Kandra with Allomantic Abilities

[TheManKnownAsHoid]

So in Shadows of Self, we see a Kandra using a Trellium spike to give herself Allomantic Powers. Harmony says he didnt know this was possible. But this WOB from 2012 says different.

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NinjaMeTimbers

What would happen if you gave [a mistwraith] a spike imbued with steel Allomancy? I'm assuming that wouldn't be enough to grant it sentience but could it then use steel powers? Can you give Allomantic powers to a kandra?

Brandon Sanderson

Hemalurgy can give Allomantic powers to a kandra. The process to do so is not known to anyone but Harmony.

source

Anybody know why?

[Fatikis]

1 minute ago, TheManKnownAsHoid said:

So in Shadows of Self, we see a Kandra using a Trellium spike to give herself Allomantic Powers. Harmony says he didnt know this was possible. But this WOB from 2012 says different.

Anybody know why?

I get the feeling that Harmony doesn't want Kandra to know this is possible. As we've also been told Harmony made a conscious decision to not turn Kandra into a breeding race. He seems to have kept the Kandra intentionally ignorant. Maybe so he can control minions. As we've seen he is not above forcing the Kandra to act as he wants.

[TheManKnownAsHoid]

But this is Harmony telling the Kandra things to tell Wax. It was heavily implied that Trellium was unknown to Harmony.

[Fatikis]

14 minutes ago, TheManKnownAsHoid said:

But this is Harmony telling the Kandra things to tell Wax. It was heavily implied that Trellium was unknown to Harmony.

I doubt Trellium is necessary for Kandra to gain Allomantic or Feruchemical abilities. 

Harmony seems to be trying to hide knowledge of Hemalurgy. I doubt he wants Kandra to know they can gain Feruchemy and Allomancy. It is easier to pretend that Bleeder is a fluke so that the Kandra do not begin to try to find out how. With enough hemalurgic knowledge it is only a matter of time that the Kandra could find ways to hide from Harmony or resist him.

[Calderis]

According to MeLaan, bleeder was TLR's personal Kandra, and they believe she was used to infiltrate the inquisitors. This would have required her to have Allomancy in the past.

1 hour ago, Fatikis said:

As we've also been told Harmony made a conscious decision to not turn Kandra into a breeding race.

They already are a breeding race. That's not the issue. A child of two Kandra would be a mistwraith. Mistwraiths breed on their own, and it requires spikes to make them sapient. They could have more at anytime except they choose not to reuse old spikes and they don't make more.

[goody153]

Yeah i don't think Harmony wants the Kandra to know how to gain allomancy/feruchemy. I think his decisions regarding them pushing them in the direction of eventually die as a race.

I bet it has something to do with possible futures or just his general design of the future which he doesn't want to happen if the Kandra gained such knowledge. 

And like others said Harmony doesn't really forbid but rather dissuades and discourages (like Marsh or Spook should be a big tell-tale of his policy) but i can totally see him hiding information from other people because that totally sounds like him. 

Obviously he knows how to (cause he's Ruin and it's his magic system duh)

[Fatikis]

13 hours ago, Calderis said:

They already are a breeding race. That's not the issue. A child of two Kandra would be a mistwraith. Mistwraiths breed on their own, and it requires spikes to make them sapient. They could have more at anytime except they choose not to reuse old spikes and they don't make more.

Harmony could have fixed this. He could have created Kandra as a sapient race that did not require hemalurgy. Instead he chose to keep them as is. Only reason I can see for this is that it leaves the flaw in the spirit web so that Kandra can be used as minions.

We don't know if Kandra can reuse spikes. As we've seen it bring great discomfort to use the wrong Kandra's spike. It could be that you could use both of a dead Kandra's spike's with a new Mistwraith without that effect. I have to wonder how hemalurgic decay is going to effect their sapience.

Kandra do not have the hemalurgic knowledge to create more spikes to make more Kandra. If any Kandra knew the secret it would have been Bleeder.

[Calderis]

3 minutes ago, Fatikis said:

Harmony could have fixed this. He could have created Kandra as a sapient race that did not require hemalurgy. Instead he chose to keep them as is. Only reason I can see for this is that it leaves the flaw in the spirit web so that Kandra can be used as minions.

We don't know if removing the block is possible and having the Kandra still be Kandra. 

4 minutes ago, Fatikis said:

We don't know if Kandra can reuse spikes.

They can, but the view the spikes as a part of themselves and who they are. The "discomfort" in ReLuur is likely due to the blessings not matching. If they were not able to integrate at all, or the discomfort were more than psychological, then TenSoon should never have been able to use OreSeur's spikes. 

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BlackYeti

Kandra, you're not getting any more of those. But they can die, so what's stopping them from creating new kandra out of the mistwraith just by recycling the Blessings?

Brandon Sanderson

That is mostly just cultural.

*paraphrased* In The Bands of Mourning, you might expect to see kandra using other kandra's spikes.

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7 minutes ago, Fatikis said:

Misplaced box, ignore please. 

 

 

8 minutes ago, Fatikis said:

Kandra do not have the hemalurgic knowledge to create more spikes to make more Kandra. If any Kandra knew the secret it would have been Bleeder.

This part I agree with, but still think is of no consequence with the above. 

[Fatikis]

50 minutes ago, Calderis said:

They can, but the view the spikes as a part of themselves and who they are. The "discomfort" in ReLuur is likely due to the blessings not matching. If they were not able to integrate at all, or the discomfort were more than psychological, then TenSoon should never have been able to use OreSeur's spikes. 

You could say that it worked. It gave him temporary sapience, but it did not appear to be a viable method. Temporarily using OreSeur's spike does not mean it was all psychological. We have no idea the repercussions of switching spikes. The act would have probably killed a human. 

We also don't know what would happen using spikes old spikes in a new Kandra. The spikes are directly tied to Kandra's ability to create and obtain new memories. Does the spike store memory somehow? We have no idea what is going to happen. There is more going on with the blessings than we know. Not reusing and testing this is definitely cultural. That does not mean it is as simple as using a dead Kandra's spikes in a mistwraith.

Side Note:
You are going to have an interesting time trying to spike a mistwraith. Kandra instinctively take the spike as it is part of them. It is essentially a piece of their soul. I doubt a mistwraith is going to be able to pierce their own spirit web correctly. Seems like it would take someone that can see spirit webs to actually accomplish this.

Edited August 3, 2018 by Fatikis

[Calderis]

1 hour ago, Fatikis said:

You could say that it worked. It gave him temporary sapience, but it did not appear to be a viable method. Temporarily using OreSeur's spike does not mean it was all psychological. We have no idea the repercussions of switching spikes. The act would have probably killed a human. 

It did give him temporary sapience, and he freaked out and rejected it. That's not my point. TenSoon didn't "temporarily" take OreSeur's spikes. As far as I'm aware he still has them. 

Why would switching spikes kill a human? Unless you've reached the number of spikes that you require a lynchpin spike to hold your spiritweb together like an Inquisitor you should be able to remove a spike and put in any other viable for that spot, which granted probably isn't many, but that's not an issue for Kandra. Which takes me to your side note. 

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focoma

We've seen Kandra True Bodies made of crystal, stone, or wood. Can a kandra use a True Body made of metal? If so, what happens if each metal "bone" had a Hemalurgic charge, and each one is touching an appropriate bind point?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. And that would work, better than you think, because Kandra have fluid bind points. But too many spikes can be dangerous to the psyche, even with Ati not messing things up.

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Kandra have fluid bindpoints. There's no precision necessary, you just drop a spike on them and they take it in and use it instinctually. We see this near the end of BoM with MeLaan, and Bleeder required it to function as we saw. She swapped out spikes constantly, and only ever had one in. 

In order for Bleeder to work the way she did, it would have required a convuluted process in which she placed a spike where she could fall onto it, then eject her current spike and instinctively take in the next as she fell onto it. To do otherwise she would have opened herself to Harmony's control every time she swapped spikes. 

Edited August 3, 2018 by Calderis

[recneps]

3 hours ago, Calderis said:

We don't know if removing the block is possible and having the Kandra still be Kandra.

It's likely, but not certain, that Sazed could.. After all, that's what he did with Koloss.

[Calderis]

2 minutes ago, recneps said:

It's likely, but not certain, that Sazed could.. After all, that's what he did with Koloss.

No its not. He just gave them the ability to breed, which they lacked. They didn't have a Cognitive block that required the spikes to overcome. They are just spiked humans. 

Kandra are a different species, that already breeds true. Without spikes they are mistwraiths, and they need the spikes to overcome a partition between the Cognitive and Physical that is a part of what they are. 

Those are not the same situations. I'm saying we don't know if it's possible to remove that block and still have Kandra be Kandra. Koloss have never had that issue. 

[recneps]

Koloss retain the effects of the spike without the actual spike.
Kandra would be similar - give them the effects, without the spike..
Why can he give Koloss psuedo-spike so they birth Koloss - not human - yet not do so for the kandra?

[+robardin]

1 hour ago, Calderis said:

It did give him temporary sapience, and he freaked out and rejected it. That's not my point. TenSoon didn't "temporarily" take OreSeur's spikes. As far as I'm aware he still has them. 

Why would switching spikes kill a human? Unless you've reached the number of spikes that you require a lynchpin spike to hold your spiritweb together like an Inquisitor you should be able to remove a spike and put in any other viable for that spot, which granted probably isn't many, but that's not an issue for Kandra. Which takes me to your side note. 

Kandra have fluid bindpoints. There's no precision necessary, you just drop a spike on them and they take it in and use it instinctually. We see this near the end of BoM with MeLaan, and Bleeder required it to function as we saw. She swapped out spikes constantly, and only ever had one in. 

In order for Bleeder to work the way she did, it would have required a convuluted process in which she placed a spike where she could fall onto it, then eject her current spike and instinctively take in the next as she fell onto it. To do otherwise she would have opened herself to Harmony's control every time she swapped spikes. 

I've wondered about these bits of info, which are true as far as we (the readers) know from comments from in-world characters, but may not actually be as true as we think they are.

TenSoon did take OreSeur's spikes, but he didn't have them in him all the time. When he returned to the Homeland after Zane's death, he buried them in a cache, as MeLaan comments how he should have "inherited" the Blessing of Potency from OreSeur, yet it was not found on him when he was imprisoned.

Later on, when he escapes and tries to return to Vin, he digs up OreSeur's spikes (in Ch. 39 of The Hero of Ages) while thinking to himself: "In addition to sentience, each Blessing gave something else. A power. But there were stories of kandra who had gained more than one by taking them from others... He now had four spikes, two Blessings, and was one of the most powerful kandra alive."

As an aside, that implies he's not the first kandra to have done this. There may be other kandra alive with more than one Blessing, since TenSoon was become "one of" the most powerful, and a doubly Blessed kandra would be even harder to kill than they already are. And MeLaan wouldn't have spoken to TenSoon about "inheriting" OreSeur's spikes if that were a completely illegal and taboo concept.

So whatever cultural reasons they have for not reusing spikes from "dead" kandra to awaken mistwraiths, apparently doesn't apply to existing kandra incorporating another one's spikes, at least under the right circumstances. What seems to have been the real issue was TenSoon's killing of OreSeur while on assignment and on orders from a human, implying there was some rarely invoked way for a kandra to do so legitimately (like in some kind of duel to the death).

Anyway, TenSoon must have pulled out all four of those spikes in him during the Resolution. We can only assume that he re-acquired them all as well afterwards, but really, he only needs his original two two be TenSoon, and he's proven to be quite the maverick already in his life, so who knows what he's done with OreSeur's spikes in the past 300+ years?

As for Bleeder running around with just one spike, and having to do this contortion to swap Metallic powers, as from F-steel (Steelrunning) to A-steel (Coinshot), both of which she exhibited in Shadows of Self: for sure, Bleeder only had the one Trellium spike in her before Wax shot her with the hemalurgic spike turned earring turned bullet. So shouldn't that mean there's a second Trellium spike somewhere that they haven't found yet, the one for F-steel?

And if the Trellium-ness of the spike wasn't what was the key in letting her steal Metallic powers, but rather some advanced knowledge of hemalurgy she possessed from long association with TLR (possibly to mimic Allomantic powers in posing as an Inquisitor), then what WAS the Trellium-mess of the spike doing differently?

Finally, was this "pull out one spike, lose sentience, and fall into another spike placed just right" trick actually how it worked? Because in Ch. 22 and 23 of Shadows of Self, she swaps REALLY quickly.

At the end of Ch. 22, after Wax figures out she's been posing as Governor Innate and tries to jab the needle into her that would momentarily paralyze her and reveal her kandra nature, she knocks the needle aside, "became a blur", seizes it, and jams it into MeLaan - emptying her steelmind while doing so.

After seeing to MeLaan and freeing Wayne, Wax goes out and tracks Bleeder-as-Innate to a nearby shed, only a few minutes behind, though he wondered just how quickly Bleeder could change bodies, as TenSoon could do it in "seconds". And sure enough, Bleeder had already swapped bodies, discarding Innate's body on the ground, empty steelmind next to it, and talking to Wax before flying off as a Coinshot.

Swapping from Innate-as-Steelrunner to Lessie-as-Coinshot in just a few minutes, with only one Trellium spike at the end? Something doesn't add up.

[recneps]

Just a few minutes? If you can make bodies fast, like Tensoon, that wouldn't be an obstacle. Keep the second spike in a pocket or somewhere, and all you have to do is the 5 second transfer of toss a spike in the air above you, eject the spike in you, and let the one in the air fall. The process has to be fast, or they'll lose more and more of themself each time they do it. Why would it take longer?

[Calderis]

1 hour ago, robardin said:

Finally, was this "pull out one spike, lose sentience, and fall into another spike placed just right" trick actually how it worked? Because in Ch. 22 and 23 of Shadows of Self, she swaps REALLY quickly.

Who says she even needed to swap? 

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Kurkistan

If you spiked out Miles' Feruchemical gold, would he be able to burn his Allomantic reserves [read: Feruchemical reserves using Allomancy] and heal it back?

Brandon Sanderson

If you spiked out his ability to heal gold and somehow left him alive?

Kurkistan

Yeah, but still having Allomancy.

Brandon Sanderson

Still has Allomancy...

Kurkistan

And he’s like in the middle of burning a goldmind.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, that would still work. It'd still have a Spiritual Connection to him.

Kurkistan

So if you're a Coinshot and you get [spiked] to have Feruchemical steel, and then you lose the spike after making a store, you can still Compound that for speed?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes... Yeah, that should still work.

Kurkistan

Was Paalm doing that?

Brandon Sanderson

That's a RAFO.

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We never see her using speed below thresholds of absolutely blurring speed. 

I think she stored a significant amount of steel, and in all of the instances of her speed that we saw she was burning metalminds witn an spike for Allomantic Steel. 

[+robardin]

Just now, Calderis said:

Who says she even needed to swap? 

We never see her using speed below thresholds of absolutely blurring speed. 

I think she stored a significant amount of steel, and in all of the instances of her speed that we saw she was burning metalminds witn an spike for Allomantic Steel. 

Well, the kandra surmised she was doing that whole "pull out and fall on another spike" thing to change powers. We never see anyone else speculate otherwise.

But that's exactly what I think was going on: she had just the one spike, and somehow did both F- and A-steel. I was just about to write a separate post pointing out that that should mean she could Compound steel, and burn her metalminds even when spiked for just A-steel.

But if she was unable to store the "extra" speed from the 10x boost in one Allomantic burst, she'd have to spend quite a bit of time running around to burn it off. She also did run out of speed in Ch. 22 and leave a drained steelmind in Ch. 23, so there's that to account for.

[Calderis]

1 minute ago, robardin said:

But if she was unable to store the "extra" speed from the 10x boost in one Allomantic burst, she'd have to spend quite a bit of time running around to burn it off.

No, she wouldn't. It coming out at the faster rate means it would all have to be used at that faster rate immediately, like if a feruchemist were tapping that heavily. Without storage there's no burn out period, it would be used at the rate it's burned. 

2 minutes ago, robardin said:

She also did run out of speed in Ch. 22 and leave a drained steelmind in Ch. 23, so there's that to account for.

Could be. She may have left it as a ruse, or she may just be able to change quickly enough it doesn't matter. The metalmind was left with the Governor's bones, so if it was real, it means she also made a new body around a new set in that short timeframe. 

[Calderis]

Ran into this looking for something else and thought it was relevant here. 

The memory degradation of Kandra without their spikes is a purely biological process. 

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mathota123

When a kandra loses its spikes temporarily and its memories degrade, is that happening because of the spikes decaying, or is something biological actually happening to where it has stored its memories?

Brandon Sanderson

It's biological. Good question!

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