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Physical/Spiritual Aspects of Preservation/Ruin


The Nameless One

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Something's been bothering me for a while.

 

In the HoA commentary, Sazed mentions how a Shard's power/body are pretty much the same. This seems to imply that the Shard's power is based in the physical realm. However, when Ruin's spiritual aspect started leaking into the physical realm at the Pits of Hathsin, he became weaker. This would imply that power is based in the spiritual realm.

 

Ruin's consciousness was trapped by the Well of Ascension, kept mostly impotent. That night, when we discovered the Well for the first time, we found something we didn't understand. A black smoke, clogging one of the rooms. 
Though we discussed it after the fact, we couldn't decide what that was. How could we possibly have known? 
The body of a god—or, rather, the power of a god, since the two are really the same thing. Ruin and Preservation inhabited power and energy in the same way a person inhabits flesh and blood. 

 

The pits are an area where there's like a leak from the spiritual realm into the physical. That's what happens there.

 

Perhaps that the thing most critical to keeping Ruin contained was Preservation somehow forcing power from Ruin's spiritual aspect into the physical world, forming the black smoke. When Ruin was freed, this power was released back into the spiritual realm, and he became strong again.

 

Thus, Ruin's goal with gaining the atium would be to somehow transmute it's power back to the spiritual realm.

 

Thoughts?

Edited by The Nameless One
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The different aspects of power don't diminish the actual power of Shards. It doesn't matter whether it's mist, atium, etc.. Preservation gave up some of its power to give beings sentience, but since then, it's been "balanced". Maybe not exactly in physical terms, but in general terms, until Sazed took over, Ruin and Preservation were roughly matched, with Ruin having a slight edge.

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I thought that the reason Ruin was equal to Preservation was because of the loss of the atium, hence the whole manipulation of the hero's to find it. I also distinctly remember a theory that the reason that Harmony's shards are balanced is because he was siphoning atium off to Marsh.

 

I guess that the question is whether a shard's spiritual aspect can be diminished by creating/investing things in the physical realm.

 

Another thing, what would the Inquisitors have done with the atium?

Edited by The Nameless One
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I think that's almost correct, Ruin couldn't find the Atium, which prevented him from overpowering Preservation as he couldn't reclaim that part of his power. If he could have reclaimed the Atium, he could have completed his destruction of Scadrial much more quickly; as it was he only had a slight edge on preservation which allowed him to act on the world in more subtle ways, slowly brining about the changed which would eventually have caused the end of life on the planet.

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Manifest a physical body and burn it.

 

Which makes me suspect that manifesting a physical body is either hard or dangerous to him.  Why else send in the Koloss first?  Either they were there to make absolutely certain of the atium, or they were there as bodyguards.

Edited by happyman
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When Leras manifested to talk to Elend in Hero of Ages, he apparently made himself more vulnerable, even though he was just a mist spirit.

 

His physical body dropped in the location that the mist spirit was, so... I'm guessing that if ruin manifests a full physical body he'd be possible (if difficult) to kill.  I'm guessing he probably also has to manifest in an area he can 'see'.

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What would Ruin burning it have done? It seemed to me that Elend and co. burning atium didn't feed it back to Ruin.

Maybe it would have been different for Ruin though. Instead of returning to Hathsin, the spiritual energy might return to him.

 

That would make sense to me. When you burn a metal, it act as a kind of catalyst, allowing you to access the power of the Shard, so Ruin burning Atium would simply have allowed him access to that portion of himself that he'd been forcibly separated from.

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After re-reading HoA, I feel the need to express it in Realmatic terms.

 

Preservation forcibly separated Ruin's cognitive aspect from his physical/spiritual ones. Ruin's physical aspect (the black mist) was confined to the area around the Well of Ascension. Meanwhile, Ruin's spiritual aspect was leaking into the physical realm as atium. This decreased his overall power level, until he could somehow return it to his spiritual aspect.

 

The question is, how do the mists factor in to this? When did they first appear, and when did Preservation attack Ruin?

Edited by The Nameless One
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I think Sazed says that a Shard's body is the same as its power is because all the aspects of a Shard can be used as energy, maybe even transformed into another aspect to empower it.
 
For example, Preservation used its Cognitive aspect (mind) to jail Ruin's Spiritual (not sure this is the correct one) aspect, cutting him from part of its power.
 
Probably it used that also to create the loop which makes Ruin's body (I read it as its physical aspect) to be leaked into Atium, even after it is burnt (thus, returning it to the Spiritual Realm).
 
Probably that's one reason TLR didn't want to finish with Atium economy but empower it, because he wanted Atium running, being constantly harvested and burnt, that's why they burn the Atium reserves in the end, so that Ruin can't get it.

 

mmm, I guess a spoiler tag is not necessary at this time because the thread is full of them but this gets me to thinking... isn't there a spoiler box anywhere? I don't see a spoiler button as I had in other forums.

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There is one. If you look in the posting box menu, the third button from the top left corner says "Special BBCode". Click it and then open the dropdown menu that appears and select spoiler. It'll give you a little box to enter the spoilery stuff into. You can still hand type the tags, but I usually forget if it's "spoiler" or "spoilers" XD

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