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Soul Stamps


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Okay, I just finished Emperor's Soul. I'm a little confused as to what happened to soul stamping. In the story, it mentions "Aon" Reo, which I think is the Aon for Destruction. But that doesn't matter. Did soul stamping just evolve INTO Aons? they both are typically the same Idea. You draw a stamp/Aon and then an action happens. Is soul stamping the old version of Aons?

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Soulstamps are a different magic system from AonDor. It uses the same investiture (The Dor), but it's based on MaiPon instead of Elantris/Arelon. It uses its own symbols, with the setting mark based on MaiPon. Shai just left Aon Reo on the wall when she left as a big insult, sort of like leaving an Anarchy symbol or something.

All of the magics on that planet are based on symbols that resemble the land of the person using the magic. So Soulstamping is similar to AonDor, but is its own system.

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2 hours ago, RShara said:

Soulstamps are a different magic system from AonDor. It uses the same investiture (The Dor), but it's based on MaiPon instead of Elantris/Arelon. It uses its own symbols, with the setting mark based on MaiPon. Shai just left Aon Reo on the wall when she left as a big insult, sort of like leaving an Anarchy symbol or something.

All of the magics on that planet are based on symbols that resemble the land of the person using the magic. So Soulstamping is similar to AonDor, but is its own system.

okay, makes sense. But where did it go? Why don't we see it in Elantris?

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7 minutes ago, Iapetus the Titan said:

okay, makes sense. But where did it go? Why don't we see it in Elantris?

Different continent. We haven't seen magics from different lands because they tend to get weaker as they get further from their homeland.

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1 hour ago, Iapetus the Titan said:

okay, makes sense. But where did it go? Why don't we see it in Elantris?

Because the magic on that planet is region-locked--it gets weaker the farther it is away from its location of origin.  And Arelon is on a different continent than the Rose Empire, so they would be weak to the point of uselessness at that distance.

The Emperor's Soul is just a little while after the events of Elantris--a few decades at most, iirc.

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  • 2 months later...
25 minutes ago, Kings_way said:

I understand that Soulstamping rewrites the history of an object, but How is it different for the Emperor? Couldn't Shai just have rewritten the history of the Emperor so that the crossbow bolt missed, Instead of recreating his soul?

The problem is that even though the Emperors body was fixed, his soul had already passed away, leaving an empty shell. In the Cosmere, the soul and the body are like two separate things that happen to work together, and Soulstamps alter what is already present.

It's like having a bowl of water. The bowl and the water are separate entities but work together to be a bowl of water. Imagine you smash the bowl with a hammer so that all the water spills out. Soulstamping would allows you to change the history of the bowl so that it was never smashed, but it doesn't affect the water because the water is not part of the bowl. In order to make the water go back into the bowl, you'd need to stamp the water so that it never spilled. However, if the water evaporates before you can stamp it, then there's nothing left to stamp and you can't rewrite the water to have remained in the bowl.

When the Crossbow killed the emperor, his body survived enough for healers to fix it, but his soul had already left to the "Beyond," a realm that is out of reach for even the most powerful beings in the Cosmere. The only thing that remained now a fixed bowl (his body) with all the water (his soul) having disappeared. So Shai's job was to fill the bowl with new water, because the old water was gone and wasn't even there to be stamped anymore. 

If there had remained any of the Emperor's soul, then Shai could have repaired it along with the body, but because none of his soul remained, Shai had to start from scratch.

I hope that made some sense, and feel free to ask if you have any other questions.

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