Healing and the Spiritual Realm

[MoS03]

Hmmm. To me, it seems as if Kaladin's eyes change colors due to physical contact with an invested object that's also touching his soul at the same time. In my eyes, it isn't a change that even involves the Ideal of his eyeballs, but just an effect of touching an Invested object in all three Realms.

Obviously, like someone else mentioned, unless he spends a lot more time holding Syl, in which case that will begin to change his Cognitive Ideal, and that now would be his static eye color.

Side thought. Would a dark eyes who never heard of a Blade changing eye color have their eye color changed?

As to healing the Blade severed arm, his Spirit should still remember that it once had an arm. Either by referring to the "Human Ideal" and recognizing the discrepancy, or the "Kaladin Ideal" says it has two arms, but in reality knows it only has one, and so applies pure Investiture in order to create this "patch." With what Kurk and Brandon have said, it seems pretty clear to me.

As to whether Kaladin should continue doing so, it seemed to work just fine with one arm, but what if he did it with every limb? Perhaps by becoming more and more of a Splinter with his Investiture Patches, he'll be less of a suitable KR, he'll essentially be more like a spren? I just don't know.

Would a spren that has bonded a person that has no understanding of language be able to speak?

Sorry for the weird post, but hopefully this spurs a little discussion!

[Kurkistan]

As to healing the Blade severed arm, his Spirit should still remember that it once had an arm. Either by referring to the "Human Ideal" and recognizing the discrepancy, or the "Kaladin Ideal" says it has two arms, but in reality knows it only has one, and so applies pure Investiture in order to create this "patch." With what Kurk and Brandon have said, it seems pretty clear to me.

 

My reading of this latest WoB is such that there is no "Kaladin Ideal" separate from what just got cut into by a shardblade.

 

Kurkistan: So when Hemalurgy rips something off the soul, is that the ideal soul or some sub-soul?

Brandon: That is off of your soul, and it can be healed; but what it's going to be doing is creating a patch of new soul. So it will not be your original soul. Does that make sense?

 

So it's all one soul: no "sub-souls" to be had. That kind of demands that we go out to the "Human Ideal" if anything.

[MoS03]

I see what you're saying. Perhaps the Kaladin Cognitive is telling the Spiritual Ideal of Kaladin that there's something missing, and to force Investiture there?

I interpreted the idea of removing a piece of Spiritweb as an event the rest of the spirit would "know" about, and could then patch with that information.

[Kurkistan]

Hm, a thought. There's not much reason for us to think that Kaladin's Cognitive aspect doesn't remember him having an arm. I can't rule it out, I suppose, but the Cognitive initiating the "hey bro I need an arm" process seems to run counter to the "flow" of how the rest of healing works.

 

So far as the rest of the spirit just filling in the missing info... I'm not so sure. It depends in part on how complex the information is and how "natural" filling in the blanks are. If it just leaves an arm-shaped hole that you can pour investiture into until it's full, then sure maybe you can heal everything back without a template. But if it's more like what happens when you actually rip an arm off, then just saying "yeah I can tell there used to be an arm there" isn't exactly going to help you rebuild an exceptionally complex piece of machinery.

 

In the complex case, a soul with backups might be able to do the trick: if the information on how to build an arm is stored in more than one place, then sure the soul can go from that. But why would the non-arm parts of the soul have that information, at least directly? It seems natural, at this point, to reference the ideals that we already know to exist and that already seem to interact meaningfully with healing, assuming Brandon didn't misinterpret me when I asked about TLR not dying of old age.

[Arook]

It is possible that kaladin Was able to heal the arm because cognitively he new he had an arm and there was an arm physically. He describes what he does as pushing on something. So maybe for lack of a better example he filled his arm with investiture using it like stem cells for the soul. His physical arm's cognitive Aspects knowing how an arm is supposed to work guided it patch his soul.

[natc]

It is possible that kaladin Was able to heal the arm because cognitively he new he had an arm and there was an arm physically. He describes what he does as pushing on something. So maybe for lack of a better example he filled his arm with investiture using it like stem cells for the soul. His physical arm's cognitive Aspects knowing how an arm is supposed to work guided it patch his soul.

We know what he did, we just want to know where the information needed to construct the arm's soul again came from.

Delicate little things, souls.

[Arook]

Right sorry I'm not being clear I'm saying investiture works like stem cells for the soul using the remaining bits from the other 2 realms to help form the missing bit of the soul. Is that better if not then I give up

[Kurkistan]

UPDATE:
 
An interesting WoB just popped up on reddit.
 
Source:

<Discussion about the mechanics of compounding>

Brandon:
No, Phantine has the right of it. The Lord Ruler died because he had filled his bracers with a large amount of youthfulness, and had to keep drawing it out to stay young--as his soul knew how hold it was, and his body kept trying to 'bounce back' to its perceived age. Compounding is how he gained enough extra youthfulness to pull this off.

You are right, however, that he didn't need to replace his bracers. He used other metalminds for the burning portion.

Phantine
Actually, I have a question about the 'bouncing-back'.

Is the 'bounce back force' actually what's stored in a metalmind?

For instance, when storing atium a feruchemist ruins his body to make himself old, and then his metalmind 'catches' the force the soul puts out as it tries to restore his true, younger age?

So you create metalminds by seesawing a ruining and a preserving impulse together.

Brandon:
The bounce back is caused by the relationship between the three realms of the cosmere. What you're saying isn't terribly far off, but at the same time, ignores some underpinning fundamentals of how it all works.

In the cosmere, your soul is basically an idealized version of yourself--and is a constant force pushing your body to match it. Your perceptions are the filter through which this happens, however, and many of the magics can facilitate in interesting ways.

 
More of the same, to an extent. It does give us an interesting tidbit on the normal interactions of people's parts, though. Historically I've been assigning the soul a bit less active of a role in the day-to-day, needing magic to get involved before it tries to do anything. But here we have Brandon saying that it's "a constant force pushing your body to match it." Then we have that "[y]our perceptions are the filter through which this happens, however, and many of the magics can facilitate in interesting ways."
 
I would wager that magical healing works by supercharging specific "make the body better" impulses from the soul, then. In that way it serves as a "facilitator" by enabling the soul to do what it's already working (and failing) at. This versus just giving the soul the extra "umph" directly, or giving it "typed" Investiture that can only be used for healing. Any are valid options, though.
 
In the normal course of things, then, we could say either that normal healing in the cosmere is in fact at least partially a function of soular impetus (explaining Drabs getting sick more easily, actually...) or that the soul is just consistently failing to push the body into health any time magic isn't involved. I'm inclined towards the former, if only because of Drabs having weakened immune systems.

--
 
P.S. Second update, from Chicago.
 
Source:

Kurk: Is there any difference between the healing that Feruchemical gold and held Stormlight can accomplish?
Brandon: There are minor differences, but they work on the same principle, so...

 
So yes Feruchemical gold and held-Stormlight are functionally the same. I neglected to inquire after Regrowth because I got caught up in the moment, though. :/

 

EDIT 2:

 

This WoB about TLR's aging seems fairly definitively to be saying that it's intrinsic to his own soul, rather than relying on a Form forcing it onto him.

 

Source:

<Discussion about compounding, specifically how TLR stayed young>

 

Brandon:

All right, so there are a few things you have to understand about cosmere magics to grok all of this.

 

First, is that magics can be hacked together. You'll see more of this in the future of the cosmere, but an early one is the hack here--where you're essentially powering Feruchemy with Allomancy. (A little more complex than that, but it seems like you get the idea.)

 

The piece your missing is the nature of a person's Spiritual aspect. This is similar to a Platonic idea--the idea that there's a perfect version of everyone somewhere. It's a mix of their connections to places, people, and times with raw investiture. The soul, you might say.

 

(Note that over time, a person's perception of themselves shapes their cognitive aspect as well, and the cognitive aspect can interfere with the spiritual aspect trying to make the physical aspect repair itself.) Healing in the cosmere often works by aligning your physical self with your spiritual self--making the physical regrow. More powerful forms of investiture can repair the soul as well.

 

However, your age is part of your Connection to places, people, and times. Your soul "knows" things, like where you were born, what investiture you are aligned with, and--yes--how old you are. When you're healing yourself, you're restoring yourself to a perfect state--when you're done, everything is good. When you're changing your age, however, you are transforming yourself to something unnatural. Against what your soul understands to be true.

 

So the spiritual aspect will push for a restoration to the way you should be. With this compounding hack, you're not changing connection; it's a purely Physical Realm change.

 

This dichotomy cannot remain for long. And the greater the disparity, the more pressure the spirit will exert. Ten or twenty years won't matter much. A thousand will matter a lot. So the only way to use compounding to change your age is to store up all this extra youth in a metalmind, then be constantly tapping it to counteract the soul's attempt to restore you to how you should be.

 

Yes, all of this means there are FAR more efficient means of counteracting aging than the one used by the Lord Ruler. It's a hack, and not meant to be terribly efficient. Eventually, he wouldn't have been able to maintain himself this way at all. Changing connection (or even involving ones Cognitive Aspect a little more) would have been far more efficient, though actively more difficult.

 

Though this is the point where I ping /u/PeterAhlstrom and get him to double-check all this. Once in a while, my fingers still type the wrong term in places. (See silvereye vs tineye.)

Edited January 4, 2016 by Kurkistan

[Moogle]

In the normal course of things, then, we could say either that normal healing in the cosmere is in fact at least partially a function of soular impetus (explaining Drabs getting sick more easily, actually...) or that the soul is just consistently failing to push the body into health any time magic isn't involved. I'm inclined towards the former, if only because of Drabs having weakened immune systems.

 

Breath is Physical, so I'm inclined to think that the healthy-effect of Breath is not related to your soul, contrary to a lot of previous stuff said about Breaths being a portion of your soul:

[00:12:00]

Questioner: With spikes, would you be able to actually transfer Breaths when they get to the other planets?

Brandon: So, spikes rip off pieces of the soul, and so Breaths are not going to be part of the soul.  You could maybe get a divine Breath, but I haven’t really decided on regular Breaths, they’re kind of stuck there in the Physical Realm, which is not something the spikes are dealing with.  Divine Breath potentially, because that’s like something that’s actually melding on to your soul.

(source)

[Kurkistan]

Ah yes, I hadn't properly incorporated that surprising little fact into my models.

 

Hmm...

 

The problem is that we have from Brandon that your Breath is "part of your soul". So we need to reconcile this with Breaths not being part of your soul otherwise.

 

Myself, I think it's a rather simple solution: Anyone at a 1-Breath level (AKA, any normal Nalthian or non-Nalthian) has that single "Breath" incorporated into their normal soul. Anything above that, then, results in "over-saturating the solution", as it were, and the Breaths stay in the Physical realm; perhaps because there's no "room" for them in the already-complete soul.

 

With Divine Breath, though (as Brandon hints at in your WoB), the Returned actually get an "augmented" version of their original soul back. It's "melded"—explaining neatly why consuming their own Divine Breath will kill a Returned, since they're eating their own original, core soul along with it. It's not just a matter of running out of power, but also of them "coring" themselves: There was the instance of Lightsong going grey when he gave up his Breath versus Blushweaver staying normal when she died of blood loss, similar to the work of Nightblood or Lifeless.

 

If we're to use the same language, then, the single Breath that Nalthians/everyone is born with is "melded" into their soul, and if they become Drab and then go back to normal afterwards then that first Breath they get back will be slotted back in, "melded" with the rest of their (previously-reduced) soul.

 

--

 

So that covers why Drabs are sickly, but not why those with more Breath are more healthy. Also why the "boost" is (presumably) a lot smaller going from 1 Breath to 2 versus that initial jump from 0 to 1, going off of Brandon's "[Drabs] get sick much more easily". It takes ~2,000 Breath to get to the Fifth Heightening and achieve perfect health. That seems a bit much.

 

I see two broad options, then:

-Any Breath beyond the first makes you more healthy almost entirely by virtue of the whole "bringing you one step closer to [the idea of being endowed by Endowment]" thing. So the health benefits from your first Breath are of an entirely different kind from those of the rest afterwards. Except for Returned, who get far greater versatility/benefits from their Investiture because it's all incorporated.

-Non-incorporated Breath are just less efficient at it than that first Breath, like how (I would say) you get power leak when Awakening any non-human construct. So that 2nd Breath only gives you 1% of its normal health boost, for instance. The apparently stark difference between being a Drab and being normal, versus the implied-not-too-stark difference between having 1 and 2 Breath, would seem to support his.

 

Personally, I'm leaning towards the first option, but couldn't really say either way just now.

 

P.S. Lightsong going all gray/Returned having "melded" versions of their original souls might be the kind of thing worth talking about on the Awakening Mechanics thread.

Edited January 2, 2016 by Kurkistan

[yurisses]

This thread made me think a lot about cosmere healing. I was pondering on how damaging the spiritual ideal would make you able to soul-heal yourself into something you are not, which seems really hacky. (Although I don't deny the hackability of cosmere magic is great about it.) On the 17th shard IRC channel, Moggle pointed out that it is essentially what hemalurgy is-  you wound your soul and heal it with something different from the frame of reference. This raises some questions though. If it is true that there is a wounding of the soul involved in getting spiked, then how do people seem to heal from it when the spike is removed? This aside, now using healing magic to morph a soul into whatever you want doesn't seem that implausible.

 

I wonder how all of this healing stuff, forging and the metallic arts interact. Specifically gold/malatium allomancy, aluminum, nicrosil and duralumin feruchemy. Gold and malatium allomancy would give useful insights into soul forgery. I would have said that tapping previously-stored connection, identity or investiture might help you gold/stormlight-heal soul wounds if gold and stormlight couldn't already do it out of the box. But they might affect endeavours to heal something into what it isn't. I was proposing that (based on our shaky understanding of identity) storing identity/connection could make soul forgery easier. On IRC Moggle pointed out that based on the same understanding, storing identity might make it, counter-intuitively, harder to forge your soul: a soulstamp of Ashravan's soul only "takes" for Gaotona because Gaotona's s soul "knows" Ashravan's.

Edited January 3, 2016 by yurisses

[Moogle]

Myself, I think it's a rather simple solution: Anyone at a 1-Breath level (AKA, any normal Nalthian or non-Nalthian) has that single "Breath" incorporated into their normal soul. Anything above that, then, results in "over-saturating the solution", as it were, and the Breaths stay in the Physical realm; perhaps because there's no "room" for them in the already-complete soul.

 

I have issues with this idea for reasons of over-complexity. You explain that Drabs become less healthy because it's not a part of their soul, and then explain why they get more healthy when it's not a part of their soul. There's two mechanisms here when we only need one. It's not impossible by any means, but it's more complicated than it needs to be than if all Breath were Physical.

 

I bring up the example of Rosharans, who have better immune systems than normal. I sincerely doubt it's because they're particularly Invested soul-wise, but rather because the ambient Physical Stormlight helps them out.

 

To further expand on that, Stormlight heals you while you hold it passively, and it is not a part of your soul - after all, healing soul wounds requires you send the Stormlight up there. So we have previous reason to believe that just holding Physical gaseous Investiture is enough to provide a healing effect.

 

I understand your thought process behind this as a way to reconcile the conflicting WoBs. And frankly, if I were going to throw out WoBs, I'd throw out the new one about Breaths not being transferable through Hemalurgy because we've got a plethora of WoBs talking about how Breath is "detached soul" and "Hemalurgy is like giving away your Breath". But the issue is, the new one has supporting evidence because there's an old WoB saying Breath is in the form of gas.

 

For the moment, I'm just thoroughly confused here, but I'm not too comfortable with your proposed model. Seems like a thing to clarify at the upcoming Bands tour...

 

EDIT: Perhaps a better solution to this problem is the requirement of Awakening to use color. When you transfer your Breath, you "use your own color". Given our knowledge of color as related to soul, perhaps when you pass your Breath you give away Physical Investiture and a bit of your own soul, and the two are not the same. The transferred soul bit might be the thing that binds the Breath to the recipient and causes it to stay where it is, unlike other gaseous Investitures which leak out of you. A marker saying "Person X has a Breath", and then the soul works to exert a pressure on the Physical to keep things that way, much like the way Feruchemy works.

 

It would also explain how each Breath is sort of discrete (operating in uses of integer numbers of Breaths), unlike Stormlight which seems quite continuous.

 

EDIT2: I'm actually really liking this idea... though I'm having issues reconciling it with the fact that you can't just spike the bit of soul related to keeping the Breath in place. Perhaps there is no such marker - the theory still works if you just have to give away any old portion of your soul to fuel the Command to give away your Breath. And of course the bit of your own soul involved would be a very good reason for why you want to use a dead person's own Breath when making a Lifeless with their old memories

Edited January 3, 2016 by Moogle

[Kurkistan]

Source:

ZAS
After several more signings, I asked my other question. "Do people in the Comsere, besides Nalthis, have Breaths?"

BRANDON SANDERSON
"No." He then signed a person's books, then said "To elaborate a little more, that's not to say they don't have a life force, because they do. But if someone not from Nalthis were to suddenly gain the ability to become an Awakener, they could not use what they have to Awaken something. That's not to say that they can't receive breaths though."

 
This was the quote we'd use to say "See! Scadrians aren't Drabs!" before the more definitive one turned up.
 

“If a native of Sel or another Shardworld travelled to Nalthis, would they be a drab?”
 
Brandon almost answered quickly, but then got a thoughtful look and paused to consider with a “hmm.”  After a moment, he replied “No, they would not be a drab.  But, no one would be able to take their breath.”

 
Zas's WoB fairly definitively shows that everyone has the "life force" that makes people non-drab; not just Nalthians.
 
So we're left with the question: are we going to say that every cosmerian has some fundamentally Physical investiture loitering about somewhere in their body, providing a health boost, life sense, etc. but otherwise completely non-interactive? Or are we instead to say that everyone just has a Spiritual soul, and Nalthians are special because they're capable of splitting off a portion of their own soul and endowing it into other people/objects?
 
Alternatively, I suppose we could say that Nalthians actually have worse souls than everyone else, but that they're propped up by Physical Breaths. So by "a life force" Brandon here was being sneaky, and Nalthians have a distinct kind of life force in the form of Breaths. I rather doubt this. If Nalthians are running around with sub-par souls propped up by Breath, then we need to explain away everything looking completely identical from the outside for Nalthians vs. Scadrians despite operating using different mechanisms.

-Not to mention that Brandon does refer to this "life force" that can't be used for Awakening as breath in the later WoB. Leaving us to choose between the "everyone has a Physical Breath" model or the "by default no one has any Physical Breath" model.
 
----

 

I found that WoB after a fair amount of argument/typing, so below the cut here I'll leave most of what my post would have been:
 
I think we're better off discounting the new WoB where we have to, or at least cutting down on how broadly we interpret it. That WoB you linked to on Hemalurgy is particularly compelling: it takes a fairly contrived reading—one we're perhaps forced to under certain readings of your newest WoB, but contrived nonetheless—to read it as saying anything but that what amounts to a Breath can be stolen through Hemalurgy.
 
I've got no trouble with Breath being fundamentally physical/gaseous: I don't think it particularly matters for this discussion, though. What I care about is what happens while it's in a person.
 
To clarify my model/thoughts, I don't see any problem with a Breath taking another form (in this case being boosted up to the Spiritual realm and melding into a patchy soul) in any drab it finds itself in. "Breath", then, is most properly a special, somewhat unnatural, form of soul-stuff, the shape it takes when it's in transit or in an Awakener or Awakened object. Once it gets where it's going and finds a nice under-powered soul to meld into though, there's no reason it shouldn't go back to normal.
 

I have issues with this idea for reasons of over-complexity. You explain that Drabs become less healthy because it's not a part of their soul, and then explain why they get more healthy when it's not a part of their soul. There's two mechanisms here when we only need one. It's not impossible by any means, but it's more complicated than it needs to be than if all Breath were Physical.

 
I'm afraid I might not quite be parsing you here. To clarify what I said, at least:
-Drabs are less healthy than is the norm because a part of their soul is gone. This is practically verbatim from Brandon in the Annotations.
-1-Breath people are exactly as healthy as the norm because they have a complete soul.
-People with >1 Breath are more healthy than the norm because <some mechanism that's distinct from why Drabs are unhealthy: perhaps simply holding onto gaseous Physical investiture a la Stormlight is enough, as you suggest>
 
The main problem, to reiterate is that we need to reconcile everything we know about Breath and health not only with various WoBs (the vast majority of which would have us believe that Breaths are chopped-off portions of souls), but with a 1-Breath Nalthian looking functionally identical to a muggle Scadrian.

Edited January 3, 2016 by Kurkistan

[Moogle]

I agree completely that every sign we've seen previously points to Breaths being stolen by Hemalurgy. I don't think that even with your model the new WoB saying Breath is not able to be stolen by spikes is anything but contradictory with our old WoBs.

 

(I still think your model is overcomplicated - why can't you stuff more Breath into your soul when Hemalurgy can, why does it need to be shunted to the Physical?)

 

You should still be able to steal at least 1 Breath if your model is correct, meaning Brandon misspoke. But apparently you can't. I'm left scratching my head and wondering if Brandon hasn't either retconned things or just forgot about how Breath works.

 

---

 

But just to discuss more about your mode's implications...

 

Say Breath is a part of your soul and that it can be detached.

 

What part of your soul was it? You can steal traits on your Spiritweb - which, as the recent Feruchemy WoBs would have us believe, is a sort of logbook of your history, detailing your age, traits, connections with places and people and times.

 

Is it "health"? Is it "lifesense"? Is it "color appreciation"? Because I wouldn't expect losing a part of your soul to lose those things as a general consequence, I would expect there to be specific traits encoding those... and it seems silly for Breath to specifically be composed of those things when it is almost entirely generic Investiture. sDNA seems to not be generic at all if spikes have anything to say about it.

 

So is your soul composed of more than sDNA traits and just has a section of it which is generic Investiture that can be detached if you're Nalthian? The sDNA genes for everything seem made of Investiture... I wouldn't expect that.

 

---

 

These Breath-given traits do make sense from what we know of Stormlight and physical Allomancy - you can burn tin and enhance your senses, you can take in Stormlight and enhance your body and heal. And Breath seems to do a sort of mixture of this. (From what I understand, it doesn't actually enhance your senses except for lifesense, but...)

 

Basically, what I'm trying to argue here is that the traits Breath give seem awfully similar to magical things we see elsewhere which don't involve putting Investiture in your soul, which is consistent with a Breath-is-Physical interpretation of the WoBs.

 

As you astutely note, base Nalthians seem basically the same as base humans elsewhere. So if Breath is Physical, we should expect other humans to have similar bits of Physical Investiture in them. I don't have much of a response to this and need to think more on it. The WoBs saying other humans totally have a life force and a Breath-equivalent at least allow for the possibility, but then we have to explain how it gets there, and I'm sort of at a loss. When you draw Investiture for a soul, what's happening? Do you draw some extra and keep it inside you as your Breath-equivalent? 

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Seems like something that we need WoBs on for clarification. I find it difficult to discuss any of this with confidence.

[Kurkistan]

I agree completely that every sign we've seen previously points to Breaths being stolen by Hemalurgy. I don't think that even with your model the new WoB saying Breath is not able to be stolen by spikes is anything but contradictory with our old WoBs.

 

(I still think your model is overcomplicated - why can't you stuff more Breath into your soul when Hemalurgy can, why does it need to be shunted to the Physical?)

 

You should still be able to steal at least 1 Breath if your model is correct, meaning Brandon misspoke. But apparently you can't. I'm left scratching my head and wondering if Brandon hasn't either retconned things or just forgot about how Breath works.

 

You are correct that my model allows (demands, really) that you be able to steal a single Breath—or at least the Breath-correlate part of the soul, assuming some transformation into a Breath-proper takes place when it's transferred out of a person.

 

If we want to be really generous to Brandon, technically that WoB isn't contradictory with the idea of that first Breath being melded into the soul. Let's read it again (with emphasis for fun):

 

 

[00:12:00]

Questioner: With spikes, would you be able to actually transfer Breaths when they get to the other planets?

 

Brandon: So, spikes rip off pieces of the soul, and so Breaths are not going to be part of the soul.  You could maybe get a divine Breath, but I haven’t really decided on regular Breaths, they’re kind of stuck there in the Physical Realm, which is not something the spikes are dealing with.  Divine Breath potentially, because that’s like something that’s actually melding on to your soul.

 

Okay so let's get as reverse-nitpicky as possible here: Technically that whole WoB was about Breaths. Note the 's'. The conversation in general seemed to be about large-scale Breath transfer/theft, more so than about the small-scale question about whether everyone's first Breath (particularly the one that they're born with) is "melded" as part of their soul.

 

If we must, then, this WoB is interpretable as meant to talk about the larger number of Breaths common in Awakening, rather than small-fry one-Breath-at-a-time concerns.

 

--

 

So far as Hemalurgy being able to stuff more stuff into your soul while I would say Breath can't, two answers:

1. It could just be intrinsic to the nature of the magics and we leave it at that. Arguments could be made about how 1 Breath is "natural" and accepted while more isn't, etc., but ultimately it boils down to authorial fiat why things work the way they do.

2. Hemalurgy isn't really in the business of super-charging souls. Hemalurgy is pretty low-power, relying more on making hot-wire changes and loopholes in existing souls than tacking on huge new portions, at least by my reading of this WoB.

 

But just to discuss more about your mode's implications...

 

Say Breath is a part of your soul and that it can be detached.

 

What part of your soul was it? You can steal traits on your Spiritweb - which, as the recent Feruchemy WoBs would have us believe, is a sort of logbook of your history, detailing your age, traits, connections with places and people and times.

 

Is it "health"? Is it "lifesense"? Is it "color appreciation"? Because I wouldn't expect losing a part of your soul to lose those things as a general consequence, I would expect there to be specific traits encoding those... and it seems silly for Breath to specifically be composed of those things when it is almost entirely generic Investiture. sDNA seems to not be generic at all if spikes have anything to say about it.

 

So is your soul composed of more than sDNA traits and just has a section of it which is generic Investiture that can be detached if you're Nalthian? The sDNA genes for everything seem made of Investiture... I wouldn't expect that.

 

I'm inclined to take the easy route and look at your last paragraph there. Just call it elan vital, but I don't really have any problem with the soul being at least partially composed of stuff that makes everything go. Sure there's connections and whatnot, but something needs to be keeping the lights on.

 

By this understanding, lose some of that "something" and things start to run less well: this just happens to manifest as decreased life sense, color perception, etc. I wouldn't be shocked if this wasn't somewhat unique to Nalthis and someone on Scadrial who lost a corresponding part of his soul would feel less well or something instead, but that aspect isn't particularly important.

 

Were you referring to this Feruchemy WoB? Because it has the line: "[A person's Spiritual aspect is] a mix of their connections to places, people, and times with raw investiture. The soul, you might say." So raw investiture is baked right into that definition of the soul/Spiritual aspect.

 

These Breath-given traits do make sense from what we know of Stormlight and physical Allomancy - you can burn tin and enhance your senses, you can take in Stormlight and enhance your body and heal. And Breath seems to do a sort of mixture of this. (From what I understand, it doesn't actually enhance your senses except for lifesense, but...)

 

Basically, what I'm trying to argue here is that the traits Breath give seem awfully similar to magical things we see elsewhere which don't involve putting Investiture in your soul, which is consistent with a Breath-is-Physical interpretation of the WoBs.

 

As you astutely note, base Nalthians seem basically the same as base humans elsewhere. So if Breath is Physical, we should expect other humans to have similar bits of Physical Investiture in them. I don't have much of a response to this and need to think more on it. The WoBs saying other humans totally have a life force and a Breath-equivalent at least allow for the possibility, but then we have to explain how it gets there, and I'm sort of at a loss. When you draw Investiture for a soul, what's happening? Do you draw some extra and keep it inside you as your Breath-equivalent? 

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Seems like something that we need WoBs on for clarification. I find it difficult to discuss any of this with confidence.

I would be frankly shocked if everyone had some Physical investiture equivalent to 1 Breath lurking in their bodies.

[Moogle]

Okay so let's get as reverse-nitpicky as possible here: Technically that whole WoB was about Breaths. Note the 's'. The conversation in general seemed to be about large-scale Breath transfer/theft, more so than about the small-scale question about whether everyone's first Breath (particularly the one that they're born with) is "melded" as part of their soul.

 

I find this an unnatural and contrived interpretation, but I think we're both in agreement on that.

 

Yesterday, I did find a WoB mentioning, I believe, that you could take the "spark of Preservation in every human" with Hemalurgy. Which makes it even more strange that you can't take Breath with Hemalurgy. I'll edit in if I can find it.

 

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Edit: The annotations: "My rationale for this is that if the spike is pulling out the pure power of Preservation—part of the power of all creation—and twisting it, it would change the body of the recipient greatly. Twisting them through use of the twisted power."

 

Though, I suppose you could argue against this WoB saying it's actually pulling out raw Investiture, I think the use of the word "pure power" disagrees. But egh, I'd assume you'd need a nicrosil spike for that... the early WoBs don't have a strict definition for everything. :/

 

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Were you referring to this Feruchemy WoB? Because it has the line: "[A person's Spiritual aspect is] a mix of their connections to places, people, and times with raw investiture. The soul, you might say." So raw investiture is baked right into that definition of the soul/Spiritual aspect.

 

Fair enough. I forgot about the mention of raw Investiture. That makes your model much more reasonable.

 

I think we've mostly explored this issue as far as it can be taken with confidence without more WoBs, so I'll stop there. But thank you for the detailed reply - lots to think about.

Edited January 4, 2016 by Moogle

[Kurkistan]

@Moogle

 

Yeah, a tad contrived. But at the very least in this case (if the contrived reading is right) that first Breath is more of a small exception to the general rule—something that Brandon would have had to go out of his way to explain in the middle of his answer—rather than something more glaringly omitted. Not my favorite way to go, though.

 

Yeah, I think we've reached a point. Thank you for your thoughts as well.

 

EDIT: In reply to your edit...

 

Yes, I agree that "pure power" implies raw investiture.

 

EDIT 2: In reply to your edit to your edit...

 

Yargh, 100% raw would indeed imply that it's unformed, making things like "strength spikes" rather impossible. Though I suppose... What if all the human-attribute spikes actually pull out the same thing, but the metal type changes how the spike affects the recipient? So if you could somehow transmute *coughsoulcastcough* an iron spike into a copper one, while retaining its charge, would it grant mental fortitude?

 

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This thread made me think a lot about cosmere healing. I was pondering on how damaging the spiritual ideal would make you able to soul-heal yourself into something you are not, which seems really hacky. (Although I don't deny the hackability of cosmere magic is great about it.) On the 17th shard IRC channel, Moggle pointed out that it is essentially what hemalurgy is-  you wound your soul and heal it with something different from the frame of reference. This raises some questions though. If it is true that there is a wounding of the soul involved in getting spiked, then how do people seem to heal from it when the spike is removed? This aside, now using healing magic to morph a soul into whatever you want doesn't seem that implausible.

 

I wonder how all of this healing stuff, forging and the metallic arts interact. Specifically gold/malatium allomancy, aluminum, nicrosil and duralumin feruchemy. Gold and malatium allomancy would give useful insights into soul forgery. I would have said that tapping previously-stored connection, identity or investiture might help you gold/stormlight-heal soul wounds if gold and stormlight couldn't already do it out of the box. But they might affect endeavours to heal something into what it isn't. I was proposing that (based on our shaky understanding of identity) storing identity/connection could make soul forgery easier. On IRC Moggle pointed out that based on the same understanding, storing identity might make it, counter-intuitively, harder to forge your soul: a soulstamp of Ashravan's soul only "takes" for Gaotona because Gaotona's s soul "knows" Ashravan's.

 

Finally replying: sorry, I was rude in overlooking Yurisses' post earlier.

 

So far as Hemalurgy (at least for recipients) wounding the soul goes, it may be simple enough to interpret it more as wedging something into the folds of your soul, rather than tearing/damaging. The spike will distort things while it's there, and do it's "hot wire" thing as well, but once you remove it there's no lasting damage and your soul returns to its normal shape. Like if you short-circuit an electrical system (assuming that the short-circuiting doesn't cause secondary damage): remove the conductor that's allowing the current to flow incorrectly and all will return to normal.

 

Makromag had some quite interesting thoughts on how Gold/Malatium could interact with soul forgery, awhile back.

Edited January 4, 2016 by Kurkistan