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The Sovereign and the Bands [BoM and Secret History spoilers]


robardin

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This post isn't about the Sovereign's identity, which I'm pretty sure is Kelsier, nor how he is attached to whatever body it is he's got, or what the eye-spike has got to do with it all. Nor how medallions or the Bands or the Excisors work.

It's about when the Bands were created. A little bit of how, but mostly I'm thinking about the interesting open questions implied by the events in Bands of Mourning, which I just re-read.

Allik says that the Sovereign teaches the Southerners about the Metalborn "being pieces of God, though we didn't have any of those at first". So the Sovereign either introduces or reveals Feruchemy and Allomancy to their populations.

Allik also says: "He gave us devices [the Excisors], and started the Firefathers and Firemothers... After he left, we used his gifts to figure out the rest, like these that make us fly." Which required Steelpushing, at a minimum, as well as Feruchemical stores for Connection and Weight. (We don't see "emergency medi-medallions" of unkeyed goldminds, which you'd think would be really useful on an airship.)

The Sovereign had "all 16 powers" for both Allomancy and Feruchemy, at least by reputation (perhaps he just had most of them, and who's going to call him out?), and created the Bands of Mourning BEFORE leaving the South to create the temple in the mountains. As Allik says, "When the Sovereign left us, he took them [the Bands] with him, along with his priests, his closest servants..." So the Bands are something that, in their lore at least (if not recorded history), was something the Sovereign possessed already during his time with them.

And yet, the Southerners also thought the "Bands" were in the form of arm bracers, rather than a big chunk of banded metal fashioned like a spearhead. That's why al the blind leads at the templ - the room with the murals of a pedestal with armbands on them, murals of the Sovereign wearing them, the empty pedestal, and then the underground chamber with dead priests in it with armbands on a "secret" pedestal - were effective.

So the Southerners never saw the Bands in reality, or never realized what they were.

But they DO know of their existence and what they're capable of doing, and the Sovereign's plan included priests returning to the Southerners and telling them he'd hidden them somewhere for him to come back for later - maybe an implied challenge to them to find it for themselves. "A test sent by the Sovereign? He was fond of those." (So he did this kind of thing with them all the time).

Anyway, most likely in conjunction with Spook, Kelsier learned or figured out about the technology behind Excisors, which must involve nicrosil and aluminum (both highly rare or completely unknown metals to the Final Empire), within 12 years of the Catacendre... Yet only brought that technology to the South, not revealing it to the Northerners. Does that imply that Spook didn't know about it?

Kelsier surely knew the F- and A- properties of all sixteen metals from his time holding Preservation, missing only some information about hemalurgy. In Secret History, he tells Spook, "My mind expanded, and I learned some things. My focus wasn't on these spikes; I think I could have worked it all out, if it had been. I still learned enough to be dangerous, and the two of us are going to figure the rest out." The rest = hemalurgy, so it seems he learned most or all about the other two Metallic Arts, minus hemalurgy.

So I believe Kelsier created the Bands FIRST, before going south, eyespiked new body and all.

I think it's very possible Kelsier was never and is not become a Fullborn, but is "only" a reborn Mistborn who relied on the Bands to gain "all 16 powers" for Feruchemy, using Compounding to refill the metalminds in it as needed (but being Mistborn, could fill the nicrosilminds needed to store Allomantic abilities).

He wore arm bracers, like TLR did, but either those were dummies, or they were ordinary metalminds he filled with the Bands (and left drained on the secret pedestal in the temple). And carried the spear around in a way that Survivorists would associate with Kelsier, but the Southerners would simply associate as something iconic of the Sovereign.

But whence came the Feruchemical abilities stored in the Bands, then? Especially if Harmony was not in cahoots with Kelsier in creating the Bands - which it sounds like he was not, as he did not approve of Kelsier seeking to return to the Physical realm at the end of Secret History, nor of Spook exploring hemalurgy.

I suspect the disappearance of the First Generation of kandra is tied to this, as unlike all other kandra, they were originally born human as full Feruchemists, and their Spiritweb would still contain the "sDNA" for Feruchemy. And when discussing kandra suicide in Shadows of Self, only the Second Generation is specifically mentioned as having widely availed themselves of that escape hatch, at the same time as TenSoon mentions how the Third Generation is now the senior one among the kandra.

And hey: what's up with the belt on the statue of The Sovereign? After initially identifying the spearhead on the statue as aluminum due to the lack of Allomantic steelsight lines to it, Wax adds, "Looks like some on his belt, too." Wayne removes the spearhead, and later, Marasi realizes it must be the true BoM. But they never went back to see if the belt, too, was more than it seemed - if nothing else, it'd be a big piece of extremely valuable aluminum, yeah? Like what caused Wayne to detach the spearhead in the first place.

Why doesn't the Northern Hemisphere folk have Excisor technology, if Kelsier figured it out with Spook's help, and brought it South only 10-12 years after the Catacendre? Did he hold back on information he shared with Spook? Why would he do that? As The Lord Mistborn, leading Elendel for the next 90 years or so, you'd think technology like that would have been massively useful to him.

Finally, there's the WoB about how Hoid giving Wax the coppermind coin that revealed that The Sovereign and Kelsier/The Survivor were one and the same was something that Kelsier would have wanted to keep secret, "to correct a lie that was being perpetrated" (presumably, that The Sovereign was originally TLR).

But why would Kelsier have created that coppermind in the first place, then? To forget that event? Evidently not to spread its knowledge. Hopefully we find out.
 

Edited by robardin
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As with @1stBondsmith, I can buy everything here except for the first generation part. Yes, they had been feruchemist while they were human, but the deal to become Kandra was made explicitly to grant them immortality in exchange for their Feruchemy. They were changed spiritually into an entirely different species. I don't believe that Feruchemy was still available to be taken from them.

Quote

Tyran Amiros

What happened to Kwaan? I was half expecting to see him amongst the kandra First Generation.

Brandon Sanderson

Kwaan went into hiding, and he was eventually discovered and executed by Rashek. He wasn't among the First Generation, though he would have been if he hadn't turned against Rashek. Rashek kept the plate, however, just as he kept Alendi's logbook. Partially because even then, Rashek was going a little mad, but partially because of the reminders about his old life they contained.

Vegasdev

I'm assuming you meant Alendi hunted him down because he turned against Alendi. Or did Kwaan also turn against Rashek?

Brandon Sanderson

No, I meant that he turned against Rashek. Remember, the members of the First Generation were offered immortality in exchange for their Hemalurgy. They had to make this choice for all of the world's Feruchemists. Because his uncle had been the one who gave Rashek the chance to become the Lord Ruler in the first place, Rashek blessed him and included him in the decision. (Speaking directly into his mind along with the others during Rashek's moment of ascension.)

Kwaan was the only one who turned down this offer, calling it a betrayal of who they were as a people. Rashek could have just made him one anyway, but in a moment of anger, he tried to destroy Kwaan—which he couldn't do, not with Preservation's power. As the other Feruchemists changed, Kwaan remained the same. Rashek eventually hunted him down and killed him.

Footnote: Brandon likely means Feruchemy, here in place of Hemalurgy.
source

His friends were made into the first generation, and all living Feruchemists were turn into mistwraiths. If the Spiritual key for Feruchemy remained present, it should have been present in the mistwraiths as well, and as mistwraiths breed true, that should have been passed down to the lager developed Kandra. 

I could very well be wrong here, but removing Feruchemy seemed to be half the point of their creation, even if Rashek completely failed in that endeavor. 

Other than that point though, I can get on board this theory. Kel becoming a Fullborn never sat right with me. 

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Wax did re-check the belt after everything happened.

 

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As the Malwish crew prepared the ship for travel, Wax stood before the statue of the Lord Ruler, with that single spike in his eye. He’d checked the belt, which was aluminum. No kind of charge. If there had ever been two bracers, he had to assume they’d been made into this one spearhead.

 

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14 hours ago, Calderis said:

As with @1stBondsmith, I can buy everything here except for the first generation part. Yes, they had been feruchemist while they were human, but the deal to become Kandra was made explicitly to grant them immortality in exchange for their Feruchemy. They were changed spiritually into an entirely different species. I don't believe that Feruchemy was still available to be taken from them.

His friends were made into the first generation, and all living Feruchemists were turn into mistwraiths. If the Spiritual key for Feruchemy remained present, it should have been present in the mistwraiths as well, and as mistwraiths breed true, that should have been passed down to the lager developed Kandra. 

I could very well be wrong here, but removing Feruchemy seemed to be half the point of their creation, even if Rashek completely failed in that endeavor. 

Other than that point though, I can get on board this theory. Kel becoming a Fullborn never sat right with me. 

That's completely a pet theory of mine - I admit it's a total stretch. But note that (a) all living Feruchemists were turned into mistwraiths, and (b) mistwraiths becoming a species that bred true, does not imply that all mistwraiths are Feruchemists in potentia. After all, not all Allomancers have Allomancer children, even if the probability is higher, and it stands to reason that Feruchemy is similar.

As for the "changed spiritually into a different species", I don't think that's a given, either. We see in Secret History that killed koloss arrive in the Cognitive Realm as humans again, even though it took four spikes plus a base human to make a koloss - unless we saw all five arrive in the CR as a result of each koloss death? If an obligator turned into a koloss has the time to complain to Kelsier about how "the beasts should have known better than to make me a koloss", that means that "inside" the physical koloss was still the original person's spirit. And the First Generation actually took on their original human bones for skeletons, suggesting they still "saw themselves" as human, which later generations of kandra would not.

It's just that the Feruchemy apparently needed for making the Excisors and for the Bands had to come from somewhere. Logically, at least one full Feruchemist got involved with Kelsier. Hemalurgy doesn't seem like the answer - why would there have been spikes for F-nicrosil or F-aluminum made in the first place from Ruin's assault on the Synod? - and The Sovereign seems to have just the one spike in the eye, not 16 spikes for 16 Feruchemical powers (which also would had to have been made from 16 Feruchemists or Ferrings that didn't seem to exist 10 years after the Catacendre). And I don't see Harmony just granting a re-embodied Mistborn like Kelsier Feruchemy as well.

Edited by robardin
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Here's another thought, centered around the question, why would someone like Kelsier go to the trouble of giving himself Feruchemy and Compounding via the Bands, then leave them for hundreds of years in a booby-trapped temple while he went off doing Something Else? 

He didn't create the Bands just to save the Southerners from freezing - that he did by given them the Excisors, plus "beginning the Firefathers and Firemothers" who are at least Firesoul Ferrings if not full Feruchemists, which he did before leaving them to "figure out the rest". The Bands was more like something he flashed at them like a prize, before disappearing with them and sending back word that he'd hidden them in frozen mountains that were particularly deadly for them.

And, it seems he went out of his way to cause any Northerners who'd learn about his actions to assume he was actually The Lord Ruler, not Kelsier.

It's almost as if he wanted the Bands to be the centerpiece of events when North finally met up with South on Scadrial.

As if he foresaw that the Bands would be needed when that happened.

He, or... Someone foresaw it.

Perhaps the necessary Feruchemy aid in making the Bands in the first place came at a bargained price, part of which was to leave them behind.

 

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Everything you brought up makes sense. The timeline for making medallions, a body and getting south always seemed pretty quick to me. This all had to be done while everyone was rebuilding civilization too. The biggest question to me is where did Kelsier and Spook get access to F-Aluminum and F-Nicrosil?

To me there are a few options:

  1.  Ruin game Marsh or one of the dead inquisitors those abilities for unknown reasons. 
  2. A Feruchemists survived, maybe someone who was a child during the last days of TFE.
  3. Ferrings(of the right kind) or a Full Feruchemists are born.
  4. 1st generation Kandras somehow (and idea I have not heard before).
  5. Harmony helps out (unlikely).
  6. Hemalurgy shanahanigans.

Personally I think it was option 6. Its a shot in the dark but I bet burning inquisitor spikes is somehow involved. I also think its possible Marsh helped, and that when you have that many spikes, the powers become more then the some of their parts. 

We also have to wonder where they even got the Nicrosil that fast. Maybe Sazed left some Chromium deposits easy to get?

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8 hours ago, MPHRD said:

Everything you brought up makes sense. The timeline for making medallions, a body and getting south always seemed pretty quick to me. This all had to be done while everyone was rebuilding civilization too. The biggest question to me is where did Kelsier and Spook get access to F-Aluminum and F-Nicrosil?

To me there are a few options:

  1.  Ruin game Marsh or one of the dead inquisitors those abilities for unknown reasons. 
  2. A Feruchemists survived, maybe someone who was a child during the last days of TFE.
  3. Ferrings(of the right kind) or a Full Feruchemists are born.
  4. 1st generation Kandras somehow (and idea I have not heard before).
  5. Harmony helps out (unlikely).
  6. Hemalurgy shanahanigans.

Personally I think it was option 6. Its a shot in the dark but I bet burning inquisitor spikes is somehow involved. I also think its possible Marsh helped, and that when you have that many spikes, the powers become more then the some of their parts. 

We also have to wonder where they even got the Nicrosil that fast. Maybe Sazed left some Chromium deposits easy to get?

#1 and #2 seem too Deus Ex Machina for Sanderson, who usually seeds the Big Reveals in advance, if subtly.

Until I thought of the "First Generation kandra are involved" angle - a wild idea, I admit - and looked for hints about it in a re-read of Shadows of Self and Bands of Mourning, I assumed it was something like #6, "hemalurgical mechanics to be revealed". But that doesn't quite fit the timeline: if Kelsier was the Sovereign yet as of the end of Secret History professed having to "discover" how it works, with Spook's aid in the Physical realm at that, they worked pretty fast with no guide to go on, eh?

On the other hand, if the Excisors only require detailed Kelsier's Ascended-level understanding of Allomancy, Feruchemy, all 16 metals for them, and how the powers work together, he could probably tell Spook how and where to find or make these new metals, and what to do with them.

The trick is, again, where to get the 16 source abilities for Feruchemy. Unless hemalurgy can be modified to turn one F-spike into another, like taking a spike for F-pewter from a former Inquisitor to become F-nicrosil? But the spike metal would have to change from pewter to ... something else, whatever would be the metal for stealing F-nicro or F-aluminum, and we know from this Reddit post by Brandon that adding carbon and forging an ironmind (with weight stored in it) into steel would not result in a steelmind (now containing speed), just a scrambled-up ironmind (albeit one that could, with great difficulty, be restored to a working ironmind).

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17 hours ago, robardin said:

It's about when the Bands were created. A little bit of how, but mostly I'm thinking about the interesting open questions implied by the events in Bands of Mourning, which I just re-read.

This is an excellent question. Particularly since we have no idea how regarding much time the Sovereign was supposed to have spent in the South. Years? Decades?

17 hours ago, robardin said:

Allik says that the Sovereign teaches the Southerners about the Metalborn "being pieces of God, though we didn't have any of those at first". So the Sovereign either introduces or reveals Feruchemy and Allomancy to their populations.

It almost has to be "introduces" for Feruchemy, because even in the North only one small group of people ever posessed it and it can only be inherited from them. This people, non-coincidentally, lived close to the shardpools/perpendicularities of both Ruin and Preservation for a very long time and couldn't produce any Allomancers via mist-snapping. So, IMHO it is as good as impossible for the Southerners to have had some unrecognized Ferrings among their population, short of Harmony changing them directly.

As to allomancers, they would have had the same ratio of mist-snapped ones as the whole world had at the time of Alendi - i.e. there would have been some Mistings, but they would have been much rarer than in the North. He certainly could have revealed those, and I also suspect that he might have brought some left-over Inqusitor spikes and made some.

17 hours ago, robardin said:

Allik also says: "He gave us devices [the Excisors], and started the Firefathers and Firemothers... After he left, we used his gifts to figure out the rest, like these that make us fly." Which required Steelpushing, at a minimum, as well as Feruchemical stores for Connection and Weight. (We don't see "emergency medi-medallions" of unkeyed goldminds, which you'd think would be really useful on an airship.)

Yes. This poses a few  questions, namely:

1. How did the priests get to that place in the first place, given that flight was invented much later? In fact, I'd say that SoScads only had flight for a few decades.

2. How did they bring all the building materials up there? 

3. Could it be that even knowing the principles and the process, creation of the medallions of different types isn't entirely straightforward? I.e. that maybe SoScads don't yet know how to make medallions for health and some other abilities?

 

17 hours ago, robardin said:

 So the Bands are something that, in their lore at least (if not recorded history), was something the Sovereign possessed already during his time with them.

Yes and no. He could have announced their existence before he left, leaving open the option that he made them during his sojourn in the south.

17 hours ago, robardin said:

So the Southerners never saw the Bands in reality, or never realized what they were.

Agreed.

 

17 hours ago, robardin said:

 

But they DO know of their existence and what they're capable of doing, and the Sovereign's plan included priests returning to the Southerners and telling them he'd hidden them somewhere for him to come back for later - maybe an implied challenge to them to find it for themselves.

Was it really the Sovereign's plan, though? Or that of his priests after he left? The thing is, a suicide pact involving dozens of people doesn't seem like something that Kelsier would do. That's not very Survivor-ish. He could be ruthless, yes, and sacrifice his followers, but it was always an "active" sacrifice, so to speak. In that his pawns were striving for something and had a chance of survival, however small. Could it be, instead, that Kelsier charged the priests with guarding the Bands before he world-hopped and _they_ were the ones who came up the idea? Maybe when they became afraid that they wouldn't be able to keep the Bands in trust for the absent Sovereign over the years, because some of their number attempted to claim them, so they came up with this solution instead?

And was it really him or his priests, who spread the rumors, or could it be somebody else? Like agents of Harmony, who was becoming impatient with the slow progress of the NoScads and wanted to give them a push by engineering a meeting between the 2 civilizations? Or maybe Marsh acting on his own?

17 hours ago, robardin said:

Anyway, most likely in conjunction with Spook, Kelsier learned or figured out about the technology behind Excisors, which must involve nicrosil and aluminum (both highly rare or completely unknown metals to the Final Empire), within 12 years of the Catacendre... Yet only brought that technology to the South, not revealing it to the Northerners. Does that imply that Spook didn't know about it?

It appears that way. Spook had no reason to keep this promising technology secret from his people. But then, maybe he got fed up with Kel at some point and they parted ways after achieving the latter's corporeality.

Another possibility is that the Excisors were made using irreplacable resources, like lerasium, and SoScad needed this technology for their very survival, while NoScads obviously didn't, so a stark choice had to be made. OTOH, I'd have thought that Spook would have warned his people about SoScads existence even if he agreed with this decision... Or could he and Kel have feared that NoScads might have gone there while they were still stronger due to their numerous Metalborn and taken the Excisors away by force? 

17 hours ago, robardin said:

I think it's very possible Kelsier was never and is not become a Fullborn, but is "only" a reborn Mistborn who relied on the Bands to gain "all 16 powers" for Feruchemy, using Compounding to refill the metalminds in it as needed (but being Mistborn, could fill the nicrosilminds needed to store Allomantic abilities).

I do not see how Kelsier as a mere Mistborn could have re-filled the portion of the Bands that allows tapping and storing in them in the first place. It is mentioned in BoM that Marasi or maybe Wax felt this part of them depleting.

17 hours ago, robardin said:

I suspect the disappearance of the First Generation of kandra is tied to this, as unlike all other kandra, they were originally born human as full Feruchemists, and their Spiritweb would still contain the "sDNA" for Feruchemy. And when discussing kandra suicide in Shadows of Self, only the Second Generation is specifically mentioned as having widely availed themselves of that escape hatch, at the same time as TenSoon mentions how the Third Generation is now the senior one among the kandra.

So, do you think that they were turned back into very old humans during the Catacendre and that they lived long enough to help newly corporeal Kelsier make the Bands?

Personally, I have a crackpot idea that Kelsier or maybe Spook or Marsh acting on his behest found Ati's body and somehow used it to give Kelsier and maybe others Feruchemy, as it would have been drenched in Ruin#s investiture.

17 hours ago, robardin said:

But why would Kelsier have created that coppermind in the first place, then? To forget that event?

An excellent question, particularly since from the informant at the party we know that he made more than one - as such "coins" were relatively common in the region and a few New Seran nobles used to collect them.

13 hours ago, RShara said:

Wax did re-check the belt after everything happened.

But didn't take it, for some reason. Ditto depleted heat medallions that he thought that the dead priests had on them. Too bad. The Set will get all that now, I suppose.

 

 

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2 hours ago, Isilel said:

I do not see how Kelsier as a mere Mistborn could have re-filled the portion of the Bands that allows tapping and storing in them in the first place. It is mentioned in BoM that Marasi or maybe Wax felt this part of them depleting.

...

So, do you think that they were turned back into very old humans during the Catacendre and that they lived long enough to help newly corporeal Kelsier make the Bands?

Well, the medallions are crafted in such a way as to grant the Feruchemical ability (in a nicrosilmind) along with the unkeyed metalmind for that F-ability to tap, right? Like the coppermind coin - it's a copper coin (the unkeyed coppermind with a memory in it) with a nicrosil ring that, only once the person holding it realizes it's a nicrosilmind, can be tapped (is automatically tapped, it seems) to F-copper, making the person an Archivist for as long as the nicrosilmind doesn't run out.

And unlike creating a medallion granting an Allomantic ability like Steelpushing (to make the airships take off), creating such a medallion/coin could be made by a full Feruchemist who knew about nicrosil (to store Ferring-ness) and aluminum (to remove Identity by filling the aluminummind at the same time), all on his/her own.

So even without setting up the Excisors, however it is they actually functiion, Kelsier could get a Full Feruchemist to create him 16 nicrosilminds, banded with 16 metalminds, one of each metal, granting him temporary access to all the Feruchemical abilities (as long as the nicrosilminds didn't run out). Call this his "F-Bands".

But, once he had that access, as a Mistborn with all Allomantic metals, he could Compound any of the 16 metals to leverage up the Feruchemical store, put some of the "excess" back into the F-Bands to recharge it, and go do some badass stuff, including using that Feruchemy to then create nicrosilminds for the Allomantic powers.

And we know (leaving someone else to dig up the appropriate WoB, for now) that a metalmind can be "overloaded" or "partitioned" with different flavors of the same ability, e.g., single tinmind can store both sight and hearing, as well as a single block of tin function as a tinmind for two different Feruchemists (who'd use different portions of the block).

So the actual Bands of Mourning, described as "an oversized spearhead crafted from sixteen different metals melded together", are the sixteen metalminds for the 16 Feruchemical abilities - stores of strength, speed, etc., - and a core block of nicrosil that is "overloaded" 32 times, with stores granting 16x Feruchemical and 16x Allomantic powers.

To refill the bands would require a Mistborn, or 16 Mistings working together and passing it around, before the Feruchemical nicrosilminds ran out, so they could Compound and refill the Bands without a loss. And it would seem a Nicroburst would the be most key Misting of all, to Compound and replenish the raw F-nicrosil ability needed to drive the whole thing.

Kelsier had the knowledge that a Full Feruchemist could do this with access to the as-yet unknown metal of nicrosil, and needed to find or produce one to make him a "Bands 16F" unkeyed mega-melded-metalmind, which he could (as a Mistborn) then augment to a "16x2FA" model by adding Allomancy to it. Except we don't know of any FF's as of the end of Secret History.

And yes, my pet theory is that they somehow re-humanized the First Generation for this purpose, or at least, re-Feruchemized one.

Edited by robardin
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5 hours ago, robardin said:

 creating such a medallion/coin could be made by a full Feruchemist who knew about nicrosil (to store Ferring-ness) and aluminum (to remove Identity by filling the aluminummind at the same time), all on his/her own.

 

I don't believe that an _unkeyed_ nicrosilmind can be tapped by anybody. IMHO, more needs to be done to make them usuable for people who are not themselves Soulbearer Ferrings, possibly involving Connection. Medallions and the Bands are _unsealed_ metalminds, not just unkeyed ones.

5 hours ago, robardin said:

So even without setting up the Excisors, however it is they actually functiion, Kelsier could get a Full Feruchemist to create him 16 nicrosilminds, banded with 16 metalminds, one of each metal, granting him temporary access to all the Feruchemical abilities (as long as the nicrosilminds didn't run out).

 

And the interesting detail here, the one that I haven't noticed before, is that an Aluminum metalmind is included. Does this mean that there is a filled storage of Kelsier's Identity in the Bands? Or the Feruchemists's? Why? And what would happen if somebody tapped it?

5 hours ago, robardin said:

But, once he had that access, as a Mistborn with all Allomantic metals, he could Compound any of the 16 metals to leverage up the Feruchemical store, put some of the "excess" back into the F-Bands to recharge it, and go do some badass stuff, including using that Feruchemy to then create nicrosilminds for the Allomantic powers.

 

So what are the Excisors for, then? Why can't they be replicated? Why wasn't the technology shared with the Northeners? Because you see, if it were possible to set up such a loop, then it could be used for creation of the new Bands ad infinitum. And you wouldn't even need any kind of Metalborn for that or to re-fill the Bands as long as no store is completely depleted, since the Bands let you burn all 16 metals and therefore _anybody_ could burn feruchemical storages for compounding. Marasi grabbed metal vials from the Set's guards in BoM and burned their metals to access Allomancy functions of the Bands. She then passed the vials to Wax ditto.

 

5 hours ago, robardin said:

And yes, my pet theory is that they somehow re-humanized the First Generation for this purpose, or at least, re-Feruchemized one.

The problem is that he also needed to somehow create Southern Ferrings and that we know that the Metalborn are needed to create and re-fill the medallions.

19 hours ago, robardin said:

Here's another thought, centered around the question, why would someone like Kelsier go to the trouble of giving himself Feruchemy and Compounding via the Bands, then leave them for hundreds of years in a booby-trapped temple while he went off doing Something Else?

As I have speculated in my previous post, it is likely that he didn't. That he left the Bands to his priests for emergencies, but they decided that they couldn't be trusted with such power and set-up the booby-trapped temple while also spreading the rumors about it, so that if Kelsier did return sometime in the future, he could find his McGuffin.

19 hours ago, robardin said:

And, it seems he went out of his way to cause any Northerners who'd learn about his actions to assume he was actually The Lord Ruler, not Kelsier.

Maybe Kel doesn't want them to deduce that he is still around and alive in bodily form? Doesn't want them to rely on him to save them, instead of working to save themselves.

And then, there is an outside possibility that the Bands were indeed made by Rashek and Kel merely tracked them down. Now, I thought that VenDell was lying through his teeth when he told the protagonists that rumors of the BoM existed during the TFE. TLR didn't seem to be the sort of person that would create a powerful artefact that could be taken out of his control and used against him. Nor did he have any need for something like that himself. But then I trawled through the older messages on these forums and some WoBs after my complete Mistborn re-read a few weeks ago and stumbled across the info that TLR had kids and once upon a time wanted to give up the Final Empire and/or his rule of it, and that these 2 things were connected. And in this light, it is possible that he might have created something like that, as an emergency weapon for his successors. And as TLR was an expert in expunging things from history, if all of that happened several centuries before Catacendre, he could have successfully stamped out the very memory of these events  by the era of Mistborn 1. 

It also seems pretty unlikely that the priests could have built the temple building, hauling the heavy building materials up onto a snowy mountain. Maybe it was there already, a relic of the World of Ash? They could have constructed the traps, etc.

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Could the BoM be the artifacts that TLR used to remove the Feruchemical abilities from the First Generation of Kandra? Rip them out of the spirit web with the BoM spear used as a hemalurgical spike. The complicated way the artifact is built might have been a necessity to take the power with hemalurgy without killing them.

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18 minutes ago, AIAndy said:

Could the BoM be the artifacts that TLR used to remove the Feruchemical abilities from the First Generation of Kandra? Rip them out of the spirit web with the BoM spear used as a hemalurgical spike. The complicated way the artifact is built might have been a necessity to take the power with hemalurgy without killing them.

The Bands were made by Kelsier, not TLR, no?  Also, TLR mutated the kandra while he held the power of the Well.  If he'd just spiked the ability out of them, they'd still be human, rather than goo monsters :)

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2 hours ago, RShara said:

The Bands were made by Kelsier, not TLR, no?  Also, TLR mutated the kandra while he held the power of the Well.  If he'd just spiked the ability out of them, they'd still be human, rather than goo monsters :)

I did not properly quote it, but my post was in reply to the post above mine with the speculation that it might have been TLR who created them after all and Kelsier only found them.
While you are probably right that some kind of mutation was required, just look at koloss to see what hemalurgy can do to appearance. Spiking humans in the right way with the BoM might well damage their spiritweb enough to turn them into goo monsters.

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11 minutes ago, AIAndy said:

I did not properly quote it, but my post was in reply to the post above mine with the speculation that it might have been TLR who created them after all and Kelsier only found them.
While you are probably right that some kind of mutation was required, just look at koloss to see what hemalurgy can do to appearance. Spiking humans in the right way with the BoM might well damage their spiritweb enough to turn them into goo monsters.

But that's adding things to people.  Taking away bits seems to kill them, or if they survive, I would bet they'd just be lobotomized.

And it would have to be genetic, because mistwraiths breed true.

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On 3/15/2018 at 5:53 PM, Isilel said:

And then, there is an outside possibility that the Bands were indeed made by Rashek and Kel merely tracked them down.

That possibility is dead.

Quote

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]
So I've always wondered, the Bands of Mourning, the actual spearhead that Wax uses. Was that made by the Lord Ruler or the Sovereign, or--

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]
No. It was not made by the Lord Ruler. The Sovereign was involved.

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3 hours ago, robardin said:

The Sovereign "was involved", eh? That's a rather specific way of not saying that "The Sovereign made the Bands of Mourning".

That's not how I understand that phrasing at all. Sounds very much like he was involved in their creation, he just may not have done it alone. 

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On ‎3‎/‎22‎/‎2018 at 8:29 PM, Calderis said:

That's not how I understand that phrasing at all. Sounds very much like he was involved in their creation, he just may not have done it alone. 

Me too. My point was that that implies he wasn't the sole creator, i.e., my theory that a Revived Kelsier still needed access to a Full Feruchemist to make the Bands, not being one himself, has a shade of support in a WoB.

 

Though come to think of it, even a Revived Mistborn Kelsier in tandem with a Full Feruchemist doesn't fully explain how the Bands we see as wielded by Marasi and Wax can grant such strong Allomancy - they think of it as "ancient Allomancy, from the time of the Lord Ruler", but it's at least as strong as Elend level Allomancy (Gen 1 Lerasium Mistborn), for Marasi to be able to Push off of trace metals, for Wax to push on hemalurgic spikes embedded in Telsin and Suit, and for mist to appear while doing so.

Whatever Allomantic abilities are stored in the Bands as discovered at the temple, are far stronger than those Kelsier possessed in life.

If that means Revived Kelsier is now a Super Mistborn, well, that seems pretty OP, but we'll find out in due time, won't we?

 

 

On ‎3‎/‎15‎/‎2018 at 5:53 PM, Isilel said:

I don't believe that an _unkeyed_ nicrosilmind can be tapped by anybody. IMHO, more needs to be done to make them usuable for people who are not themselves Soulbearer Ferrings, possibly involving Connection. Medallions and the Bands are _unsealed_ metalminds, not just unkeyed ones.

I don't quite follow the distinction here between "unkeyed" and "unsealed" metalminds.

As I understood it, "unkeyed" means "a metalmind with no Identity component", such as the goldmind that Wayne picked up from the Set that he was amazed to find he could tap, even though he hadn't filled it. That's because it was filled with "Identity-free" health, which I'm really curious how the Set managed to create without the Excisor technology that allows the Southerners to create medallions, since the Set didn't know such things were possible. In any case, it surely involves "shunting" Identity into an aluminummind at the same time as filling the metalmind in question.

The medallions, or the coppermind coin that Hoid gives to (throws at) Wax, have a nicrosil ring that is a nicrosilmind granting a Feruchemical (or possibly an Allomantic) power. For this to work, it has to be "Identity-free", or else only the Feruchemist who filled the nicrosilmind could tap it, which is rather pointless.

Since the medallions work for anybody as long as they know the medallion contains a nicrosilmind of the proper type (easy to guess when you can see the other metals, as long as you know what they do), they can indeed be "tapped by anybody".

Edited by Pagerunner
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20 minutes ago, robardin said:

I don't quite follow the distinction here between "unkeyed" and "unsealed" metalminds.

The current understanding was:
◘ Unkeyed Metalmind  - can be tapped into by anyone with that power.
◙ Unsealed Metalmind - can be tapped into by anyone.

Under that logic, "Unkeyed" Nicrosilminds could only be tapped into by Soulbearers, while the Nicrosil portion of "Unsealed" Medallions can be tapped into by anyone, regardless of their magical powers or lack thereof. Basically, we all agree here:

20 minutes ago, robardin said:

For [Medallions] to work, it has to be "Identity-free", or else only the Feruchemist who filled the nicrosilmind could tap it, which is rather pointless.

But Isilel is also saying this: For [Medallions] to work, it has to be "Unsealed," or else only Soulbearers could tap the Nicrosilmind in it, which would be rather pointless.

Edited by The One Who Connects
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48 minutes ago, robardin said:

Though come to think of it, even a Revived Mistborn Kelsier in tandem with a Full Feruchemist doesn't fully explain how the Bands we see as wielded by Marasi and Wax can grant such strong Allomancy - they think of it as "ancient Allomancy, from the time of the Lord Ruler", but it's at least as strong as Elend level Allomancy (Gen 1 Lerasium Mistborn), for Marasi to be able to Push off of trace metals, for Wax to push on hemalurgic spikes embedded in Telsin and Suit, and for mist to appear while doing so.

The issue here is one of the rate of tapping. The attributes could have been stored by a Mistborn of Spook's relatively low strength. When being drawn out of the bands, if they were drawn out at a faster rate than the Mistborn could have stored, the ability would be stronger, no different than any other type of Feruchemy. 

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OK, so the goldmind that Wayne picks up from the Set is "unkeyed", in that he (as a Bloodmaker Ferring) can tap it, sure. I get that.

But every nicrosilmind we've seen so far in Era 2 has been "unsealed", then. We haven't seen a single known Soulbearer Ferring, yet all the medallions and the coppermind coin are examples of "realize what it is, and you suddenly gain the ability stored in it via auto-tap".

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

So I went back to check on when Allik talks about the Sovereign and the Bands for the first time - he said “When the Sovereign left us, he took them with him, along with his priests, his closest servants." Them being the Bands. 

"He’d left the priests there, with the Bands, and told them to protect them until he returned for them. And, that was dumb, yah? Because we could really use those to fight the Deniers of Masks.

So they know what the Bands are and can do, suggesting they'd seen them used and taken away - but not that it was a spearhead. The false bracers at the temple were probably decoys even then.

I think the Excisors are somehow a form of Limited Bands.

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  • 2 months later...

I don't think that Kelsier got Feruchemy from the first generation, but I do believe that the first generation still has the Feruchemy Gene in their spiritweb.

How I understand Kandra and Mistwraith creation is that Rashek create a blockage between the cognitive aspects and physical aspects of all Feruchemists, this caused the Feruchemists to muatate into mistwraiths and lose their Feruchemy and minds. Spiking a mistwraith creates two holes in the blockage that allows them to have conscience again, but in the case of the First Generation the holes were not big enough compared to the blockage to get back their Feruchemy or original form that was inscribed in their Spiritual DNA.

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