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How do Returned return?


Thunder_93

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I hope it wasn't discussed before.

 

My question isn't about "where do they get the power from" (I personally think it's Endowment, however he chooses who to get back. Maybe what the priests say is after all right. If im totally wrong, feel free to tell me how it really is, even if this isn't the subject here :P )

 

My question is more about the process itself. So, they first gotta die. But what then? Does the dead corpse just come back to life, and transform into a Returned (as they're taller and all that)? I don't think so. As how would you know who's going to return? They'd have to keep every dead body for maybe a couple of days somewhere, before they burn or dig it (would be bad if a Returned comes back and is digged in the ground in his tomb).

Do they just appear, and walk shining and glowing into the city, everyone praising them (doubt it, more sarcasm :P )

 

Is that ever written somewhere / do we know it?

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As we saw with the LightSong example.

When a people that Endowment had choose to return dies.

Within some seconds if the deadman agree to the chance of returning and change the things, his body is resurrected and became a Returned version of self

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Within some seconds if the deadman agree to the chance of returning and change the things, his body is resurrected and became a Returned version of self

 

Maybe the time varies, but for Lightsong, at least, a few seconds wouldn't have worked, because he died at sea during a storm.

They would have had to wait until the storm was over to start looking for him, and then they still had to fish him out of the drink.

 

About the mechanics of Returning, I think it's similar to snapping or the Shaod. Trauma causes cracks in the soul and something can slip in and add stuff to the spiritweb. In the case of Allomancy and AonDor, what's added is a little bit of investiture that allows access to a lot of investiture. But on Nalthis it has to work differently, because the entire huge divine breath has to be added to a mortal soul, so the cracks have to be correspondingly huge, and probably the only thing that causes cracks that huge in a soul is dying.

 

So a person physically dies (and their soul gets cracked, but this is just a personal theory), but it takes a little while before the soul moves on to the "next place" (heaven/paradise? the tranquiline halls? reincarnation? we don't know). Endowment uses that window to shove a giant splinter up the soul's big crack (sorry, I couldn't resist) and sends the soul back to its former body after it's had a vision of the future. Or possibly the power of the splinter allows the soul to make its own way back into the body.

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Maybe the time varies, but for Lightsong, at least, a few seconds wouldn't have worked, because he died at sea during a storm.

They would have had to wait until the storm was over to start looking for him, and then they still had to fish him out of the drink.

If too much time pass, Endowment can't retrive the Soul before his final Destination (that I suppose is the Depth of Spiritual Realm).

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I guess Lightsong was hanging out in the cognitive or maybe spiritual realm until his body was ready for him to come back. Endowment was probably up there waiting for the perfect moment to send him back and give a real shock to Llarimar.

 

Interesting idea. Maybe Endowment only Returns human Cognitive Shadows (i.e. souls who did not move on).

Edited by skaa
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  • 2 weeks later...

Maybe the time varies, but for Lightsong, at least, a few seconds wouldn't have worked, because he died at sea during a storm.

They would have had to wait until the storm was over to start looking for him, and then they still had to fish him out of the drink.

 

About the mechanics of Returning, I think it's similar to snapping or the Shaod. Trauma causes cracks in the soul and something can slip in and add stuff to the spiritweb. In the case of Allomancy and AonDor, what's added is a little bit of investiture that allows access to a lot of investiture. But on Nalthis it has to work differently, because the entire huge divine breath has to be added to a mortal soul, so the cracks have to be correspondingly huge, and probably the only thing that causes cracks that huge in a soul is dying.

 

So a person physically dies (and their soul gets cracked, but this is just a personal theory), but it takes a little while before the soul moves on to the "next place" (heaven/paradise? the tranquiline halls? reincarnation? we don't know). Endowment uses that window to shove a giant splinter up the soul's big crack (sorry, I couldn't resist) and sends the soul back to its former body after it's had a vision of the future. Or possibly the power of the splinter allows the soul to make its own way back into the body.

 

I like the idea that the reason people need to die is because the Divine Breath is too large to be stapled onto their spiritweb. Is it possible that it works the other way around, i.e. the normal spiritweb is attached to the Divine Breath? This could be why the Returned don't remember their former lives, because their spiritweb is dominated by the Divine Breath. I'm not sure how this interacts with the Returned who aren't "Gods" but I don't really remember much talk of their lives before their Return.

 

And this is where I admit that the magic system in Warbreaker is the one I understand the least and I'm about 3/4 of the way through a reread, so take this with a grain of salt.

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The only magic systems we know less about than the Breath magic system are Hemalurgy (due to the complexity of the human body and its bind points) and AonDor, because Sanderson doesn't want to go through the work of making all the modifiers for Aons, including the ones that make the Aon work like programming (i.e. If someone steps here, activate Aon Tia and send them to the dungeon)

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