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Sky Colors


WeiryWriter

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So Sky Colors are a thing on Darkside that are mentioned a couple of times but never really explained but I think I've figured it out.  OlanValesco over on Reddit went to the White Sand release party and asked about Darkside.  One of the things that Brandon revealed was that on Darkside everyone's eyes, teeth, and fingernails glow.  I'm willing to bet that the color a person fluoresces is their Sky Color.

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I think this would still support the plant/life cycle we see on Dayside but with a slight shift in darkside. There are lichen in the real world that light up when exposed to blacklight/UV light. There are also lichen that are airborn and never settle on the ground. Finally lichen can survive in a wide range of biomes. So Dayside's lichen is on the sand and reacts to moisture provided by sand mastery. Darksiders lichen is possibly in the air, injested or breathed in, and has a symbiotic relationship with the darksiders themselves. Which would explain the teeth nails and eyes glowing. Yes all conjecture, but I feel it is leaning in that direction. 

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I have to be honest... I think the situation is far less simple than this.

For what we know, Darkside has no a source of Investiture (like Dayside's sun)... Therefore How this plant/fungi may do what they do it's unclear.

I am one of the firsts (or maybe the first, i don't remember) who develop the Plant as Taldain's Focus but this new Information made me stress my brain to find an avaliable new model (a model who works for both Dayside and Darkside)

Edited by Yata
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3 hours ago, Yata said:

I have to be honest... I think the situation is far less simple than this.

For what we know, Darkside has no a source of Investiture (like Dayside's sun)... Therefore How this plant/fungi may do what they do it's unclear.

I am one of the firsts (or maybe the first, i don't remember) who develop the Plant as Taldain's Focus but this new Information made me stress my brain to find an avaliable new model (a model who works for both Dayside and Darkside)

Just because native Darksiders do not view the Skycolors as magic, does not mean it isn't magic. Khriss says daysiders have magic, to which Kenton scoffs at. It isn't till later when she mentions sand mastery as the magic that she is referring to that he begins to avoid her questions. So for the sand masters, sand mastery isn't magic. To everyone else it is dangerous, something to be awe of, or something to revile, but to the users itself, not magic. It sounds like all darksiders have skycolors. So why would they view what everyone can do naturally as magic? It would be like saying our ability to clot our blood on a certain level of injury, close the wound, and then a scab falls away to reveal healed skin is magical. There is nothing saying that Darksiders don't have access to investiture. By the sheer nature that we know out of world that their skycolors are un-natural/magical means something is going on. Finally Brandon has said Taldain's investiture is tied into the ecology. Just because one side does not function as the other side does, does not preclude it from "filtering" investiture a different way. 

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On 6.7.2016 at 1:33 PM, Yata said:

I have to be honest... I think the situation is far less simple than this.

For what we know, Darkside has no a source of Investiture (like Dayside's sun)... Therefore How this plant/fungi may do what they do it's unclear.

I am one of the firsts (or maybe the first, i don't remember) who develop the Plant as Taldain's Focus but this new Information made me stress my brain to find an avaliable new model (a model who works for both Dayside and Darkside)

What? We do know that there is magic on the darkside. Baon confirmes that Scythe has some kind of magic power. We don't know exactly what it is or how it works but we know it's there. And it makes sense that skycolors would be part of it. Scythe just seems to be the only one that figured out how to properly use it. 

As Pathfinder said Sand Masters also didn't view Sand mastery as magic, as it seems to be an ability that most daysiders have but need to train in order for it to be used properly. It makes sense that it would work similar on the darkside. All darksiders have skycolors, which we know they can only use on the darkside, but most just haven't figured out how to train themselves to use it properly. Just Scythe did.

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  • 5 months later...
  • 4 weeks later...

I'm sure there's more to it than that. Khriss has heard stories of Scythe having the ability to compel people to do as he commands and Baon believes the histories that say he's centuries old and can vouch for the fact that he hasn't visibly aged in years. Plus he says he's seen Scythe 'do things impossible of any normal man'. Given that we already have a proper term for something Darkside has that Dayside doesn't, which the locals don't think of as magic (just like Kenton doesn't think Sand Mastery is 'magic') it would strain conservation of detail for Skycolors to be just a fancy kind of dye and that there's some other system never hinted at that Scythe has figured out how to tap into, Actually, it can't be 'just' a dye anyways because when Khriss looks at Kenton's eyes she notices how colorful they are even though they have no Skycolor; can't imagine a dye there. It sounds like something inherent to the person, which is also why the color of Scythe's Skycolor is apparently significant.

Anyhow, Brandon has mentioned plans for two followup works to White Sand (whether they'd be published as graphic novels or books appears up in the air but their eventual release isn't, especially as we need to eventually learn how Khriss became the cosmere scholar we know) so we should find out what's up with Darksider magic one day.

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For the sake of simplicity it would be easiest to identify darkside magic with Skycolors. The thing that doesn't fit for me though is that Scythe's powers have some mysterious touch with many rumors running - which are confirmed by Baon - while Skycolors seem to be something ordinary on darkside so that Kenton having no Skycolors is strange enough for Khriss to mention it at all.

Of course this could be just due to the fact that the prose version we read is not polished and that "discrepancy" would have been mended in a release version of the book.

I am really looking forward for sequels, both because of magic system/worldbuilding and the character development/story. I am not sure whether we will see Khriss become a worldhopper onscreen though, since that part of the story is missing for every other worldhopper for the time being.

Edited by Pattern
Typo-Ex
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True, but none of the others we've seen so far aside from Vasher have been POV characters and there's good reasons we couldn't see that see that part of his history in Warbreaker. Khriss is a POV character in the prose version and still one of the key characters in the graphic novel even if her earliest scenes were all cut. And she's such a major background element of the entire cosmere that it would be very weird if we don't learn what prompted her to wander the worlds researching magic systems and forcing poor Nazh to do dangerous and/or crazy things. Though I concede that maybe it will come out in some other source than the planned White Sand sequels, like maybe the novella Brandon just told us he's planning that would be set in Silverlight.

As for Skycolors being ordinary while Scythe's powers are noted to be extraordinary, well we've seen that before. Breath is completely ordinary on Nalthis but people who manage to obtain more of it than the one that they're born with can do progressively more amazing things with people who reach the Fifth Heightening or above becoming functionally immortal, then things really get crazy beyond that. It's possible that (while not explored in the material we have) Skycolors are similarly 'ordinary' but there's a way to do great things with them, if you know how or via some exploit that Scythe figured out and we can't even guess at because we know very little about the mechanics of Investiture on Taldain right now.

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  • 1 year later...
15 minutes ago, theuntaintedchild said:

Have skycolors been mentioned in the Graphic Novel version? I don't recall ever having heard of them before. I only read the first graphic novels worth of the prose version.

The name was changed but they are mentioned briefly, trying to look and find what they are now. 

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On 3/20/2018 at 3:38 AM, Alfa said:

Regarding the question of Darkside investiture it is worth mentioning that Khriss doesnt't mention anything about it in Arcanum Unbounded.

She actually does quite specifically, she just doesn't provide details. Khriss mentions in the essay on Taldain that for a long time it was assumed that Autonomy's Investiture only influenced Dayside but they now realize that's not strictly the case. Considering that Daysiders don't consider Sand Mastery to be 'magic' it's quite likely that if Skycolors/Shifting Colors are a Darkside form of Investiture, the inhabitats there don't think of them as 'magic' either. And if it's a more subtle application of Investiture (as the essay implies) it's quite possible that most Darksiders could be familiar with them as a concept but have no idea how to do anything with them, making it even harder to make the connection between the colors and Investiture.

As for why the essay doesn't go into more details, there are two easy explanations. First, the Watsonian: It's not really relevant to the capsule summary of the planet that Khriss is giving, so she mentions it briefly and then moves on to more important matters. Then there's the Doylist explanation: Brandon's saving the information for some future project.

Edited by Weltall
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Here's a confusing WOB that states there's only one magic system on Taldain, and that the Sky Colors are "more a matter of ecology than the magic" - but then goes on to talk about how closely tied the magic/ecology are.  So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not sure how this fits in with Scythe.  

 

Quote

Rah179

How significant will the White Sand be to the cosmere? Any hints on the Shard that resides there?

Brandon Sanderson

Moderately. (Its magic has some cool ramifications for off world use, and several characters factor prominently into the Cosmere.)

Phantine

Is there more than one magic system in white sand?

Brandon Sanderson

Only one in the current outline.

WeiryWriter

Does the one magic have more than one variation? Because I got the impression that there was something going on on the Darkside? Though I guess the Sky Colors (I think that's what they're called, I read the draft you send out early 2014 so my recollection is a little fuzzy) don't have to be related to magic. Or you could have written them out if they were...

Brandon Sanderson

In intended the colors on Darkside to be more a matter of the ecology than the magic--though, on that planet, magic and ecology are very closely tied together. (Well, I guess most of the magics are.)

source
 
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  • 1 month later...
On 22/03/2018 at 11:44 AM, Weltall said:

She actually does quite specifically, she just doesn't provide details. Khriss mentions in the essay on Taldain that for a long time it was assumed that Autonomy's Investiture only influenced Dayside but they now realize that's not strictly the case. Considering that Daysiders don't consider Sand Mastery to be 'magic' it's quite likely that if Skycolors/Shifting Colors are a Darkside form of Investiture, the inhabitats there don't think of them as 'magic' either. And if it's a more subtle application of Investiture (as the essay implies) it's quite possible that most Darksiders could be familiar with them as a concept but have no idea how to do anything with them, making it even harder to make the connection between the colors and Investiture.

As for why the essay doesn't go into more details, there are two easy explanations. First, the Watsonian: It's not really relevant to the capsule summary of the planet that Khriss is giving, so she mentions it briefly and then moves on to more important matters. Then there's the Doylist explanation: Brandon's saving the information for some future project.

Dang, I need to check out Arcanum Unbounded again.  I skipped the White Sand stuff because I thought it was just the same as the graphic novel/prose version.

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