Threnodite Aluminum

[TNTman20]

I was recently reading Shadows for Silence when I had a conundrum.

They say that it is silver that is what is used to attack shades and protect the waystops.

While scrounging through Arcanum, i found this quote

Quote

 

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

In Secret History, Nazh briefly mentioned that there's requirements or conditions to become a Cognitive Shadow. Can you tell us one of those?

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Uh, lots of Investiture. Is one way. As a certain person discovered.

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

If that person were to not have entered Preservation's pool, it still would have given the same result?

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

If they had not, they would be gone.

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

I wasn't clear. If they had done a different pool, not Preservation's.

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Oh, if they had been able to Invest themselves heavily, then they could have stuck around, yes. That wasn't Preservation's pool, that was more a function of--dipping themselves, pulling an Achilles inside of a Shardpool when you are dead, turned out to work. It's not the only way, not everyone on... Threnody, for instance, is heavily Invested.

 

We know that investiture can be messed up with aluminum, seeing as how aluminum is basically the null of the Cosmere, preventing invested objects or investiture in general from being used/ detected.

So here is the theory:

Silver on Threnody is actually just aluminum.

This is due to the fact that aluminum can screw with investiture and aluminum can protect against certain forms of investiture a la Lashings and Emotional/Steel/Iron Allomancy.

We also know that this wouldnt be the first time aluminum has been given a different name, seeing as how Ralkalest is actually just aluminum in The Emperors Soul.

What do you guys think? I'd love some feedback.

[Agent34]

Quote

Questioner

In Mistborn, silver doesn’t play a role. But then in Shadows for Silence, silver does play a role...

Brandon Sanderson

It does. I still wanted silver to be part of the Cosmere.

Questioner

But we’ll never see it in Scadrial?

Brandon Sanderson

It does not, as they understand currently, interact with Allomancy, with the three Metallurgic Arts. Silver does have a Cosmere role.

source

This would suggest the silver is in fact silver rather than aluminium.

I don't think you're the first to come to the conclusion you did, sorry to burst the bubble.

[Yata]

It was considerated but there are tons of problems:

- First of all, Alluminium in Metallic state is really a rare resource that comes to be' only under specific circumstances (Volcanos for example)

- Therenody's Silver "rots" when he made contact with a Shade while the Alluminium will not interact.

- Brandon never used an actual real word do mask stuff.... As you said he used Ralkaest (probably mistyped) as a foreign name for Aluminium but he never used a real world word to mask those kind of things.

- there is a WoB about burning Aluminium could be' an alternative to use Therenody's Silver... So unless he was trolling us, those are different stuffs 

Of course this doesn't mean It's impossi but It's very unlikely.

Someone proposed that Silver affects in a negative way cognitive entities but It's widelly unproved as something like that would be' knowed in Roshar

Edited March 30, 2018 by Yata

[TNTman20]

Drat

I was fond of that theory.

Oh well

Thank you both

[teknopathetic]

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It does not, as they understand currently, interact with Allomancy, with the three Metallurgic Arts. Silver does have a Cosmere role.

I wonder what silver can do eventually? Edit: What it can do with allomancy. 

Edited April 5, 2018 by teknopathetic

[Landis963]

17 minutes ago, teknopathetic said:

I wonder what silver can do eventually? 

On Threnody, silver can repel the shades and counteract their burning touch.  Elsewhere, we don't know.  

[Weltall]

2 hours ago, teknopathetic said:

I wonder what silver can do eventually? 

Aside from its specific use on Threnody... it looks pretty? And it's very useful on Scadrial even though it's not allomantically viable itself because it's necessary to create electrum, which is an allomantic metal. A couple other tidbits on silver:

In-universe they do not currently know why it does what it does

Brandon has explicitly nixed the idea that silver can operate the same way as aluminum in being an Investiture-sink

Brandon has RAFO'd whether other Cognitive Shadows are harmed by silver in the way that Shades are

[teknopathetic]

5 hours ago, Weltall said:

Aside from its specific use on Threnody... it looks pretty? And it's very useful on Scadrial even though it's not allomantically viable itself because it's necessary to create electrum, which is an allomantic metal. A couple other tidbits on silver:

In-universe they do not currently know why it does what it does

Brandon has explicitly nixed the idea that silver can operate the same way as aluminum in being an Investiture-sink

Brandon has RAFO'd whether other Cognitive Shadows are harmed by silver in the way that Shades are

These still make it seem like silver might actually have a use in allomancy, but that use isn't something anyone, even Brandon himself, is quite sure of yet. The fact that silver makes an alloy seems to hint that silver has some sort of property, but maybe it has to do with some arcane attribute of allomancy (amplification, cognitive-realm usage, etc etc).

Brandon wants silver to be important in the cosmere for some reason. My guess is that silver is a metal heavely associated with ambition, and that associated means that silver was less able to be a vessel for allomancy and feruchemy. However, Silver is not completely off the table, and can be used in some bizarre and roundabout ways (almost like a magic-hack)

Edited April 5, 2018 by teknopathetic

[Calderis]

57 minutes ago, teknopathetic said:

The fact that silver makes an alloy seems to hint that silver has some sort of property, but maybe it has to do with some arcane attribute of allomancy (amplification, cognitive-realm usage, etc etc).

This in itself is meaningless. Pewter contains lead. Nicrosil contains silicon... Most alloys contain non-allomantic metals

I'm not saying that there is not more to silver. I just mean that it's inclusion in an alloy tells us nothing. 

As for Allomancy, I don't think it does anything in itself. If it did it would have been discovered, as Mistborn were able to burn anything. Silver does have a function in the Cosmere though and as the magic progresses, I'm sure that silver will have interactions with the Metallic Arts that alter the technology. 

[Weltall]

Ninja'd by Calderis as I was typing... oh well, don't want the effort to go completely to waste.

Silver has a role in Threnody because Brandon wanted the metal to be useful somewhere after it didn't wind up fitting in the Metallic Arts. The story can be found here. I don't think we can make the jump from 'metal is part of an alloy' to 'metal has a use in the Metallic Arts apart from that alloy' since otherwise you'd have to account for other alloy components like bismuth, antimony and lead also having some potential role. Since the metals are just 'keys' and the Investiture is looking for the right molecular signature, I don't think that the components of an alloy have their own uses except when the components are already viable metals.

To illustrate, consider the case of bad alloys. If the proportions are slightly off you might get something that you can burn, but it won't work as well as it should. If the proportions are way off or you've added additional metals, you get something that won't do anything except give you metal poisoning. The 'key' doesn't match any of the patterns that Preservation's Investiture is looking for. So I don't think that there's any special property of silver just waiting to be discovered in the Metallic Arts.

[SilverTiger]

In one of the Era 1 Mistborn novels (I think HoA), it is explicitly stated that "silver is a frustrating metal for Mistborn" because they can't burn it (Vin was chained using silver).

Also, aluminium is not found on its own naturally-- it has to be smelted down out of ore, normally bauxite. And it has a really high melting temperature. Remember, it took near-modern technology for Scadrial to rediscover aluminum. And in the real world, aluminum was once considered a precious metal simply because it was so hard to produce/procure. The top of the Washington Monument is aluminum, for instance.