lifeless with night blood

[Kalaksbreath]

I just finished my third reread of Warbreaker and Vasher had a line/thought in there that seams kinda crazy (I use the audio books so I don't have the exact quote) but it was something like it was bad enough she (Shashara) reveled the one command lifeless command phrases he couldn't let there be armys of lifeless with nightbloods.

So the obvious implication here is that lifeless can use nightblood with out getting destroyed or "eaten" by him  is this possible it doesn't make sense to me because we know that nightblood eats all the investiture you have in you and most lifeless have one or so breaths in them so wouldn't nightblood just eat that breath then kill the lifeless. Or because they are dead would nightblood be able to be used with out eating investiture. Or is this just Vasher imagining the worst case scenario or did the know something.

[Karger]

1 hour ago, Kalaksbreath said:

So the obvious implication here is that lifeless can use nightblood with out getting destroyed or "eaten" by him

They cannot.  However a Lifeless with enough breath could draw a Nightblood equivalent for some time.  Glorysinger drew Nightblood once during the battle of twilight falls and destroyed an entire army.  Image 5 of those which can be used at no consequence or personal risk to the person giving the orders. 

[Halyo_Alex]

1 hour ago, Karger said:

They cannot.  However a Lifeless with enough breath could draw a Nightblood equivalent for some time.  Glorysinger drew Nightblood once during the battle of twilight falls and destroyed an entire army.  Image 5 of those which can be used at no consequence or personal risk to the person giving the orders. 

so basically, using the Lifeless as a proxy to wield Nightblood, still good at fighting (if you Awaken the right person's corpse) and not going to kill the awakener if the lifeless runs out of Breaths to feed Nightblood with.

[Karger]

29 minutes ago, Halyo_Alex said:

so basically, using the Lifeless as a proxy to wield Nightblood, still good at fighting (if you Awaken the right person's corpse) and not going to kill the awakener if the lifeless runs out of Breaths to feed Nightblood with.

Yep.  Also even if it looses it can still win because at that point any live humans are going to have trouble resisting Nightblood so they will pick him up and use him on each other.

[+robardin]

On 4/1/2020 at 3:52 PM, Halyo_Alex said:

so basically, using the Lifeless as a proxy to wield Nightblood, still good at fighting (if you Awaken the right person's corpse) and not going to kill the awakener if the lifeless runs out of Breaths to feed Nightblood with.

Well, I'd imagine that Nightblood could rip out the one Breath used to Awaken the Lifeless... Ordinarily that is too "sticky" to remove with "Your breath to mine" from its creator, but I bet Nightblood could get at it. Then it'd collapse and all you'd have left is a corpse, same as if Nightblood "ate" a human wielder of all Investiture, I suppose.

So it's not like the Lifeless could continue wielding Nightblood, but by definition a Lifeless is expendable and reusable, so yeah, pumping Lifeless with hundreds of Breath and setting one loose with Nightblood would be terrifying.

[Karger]

3 hours ago, robardin said:

Well, I'd imagine that Nightblood could rip out the one Breath used to Awaken the Lifeless... Ordinarily that is too "sticky" to remove with "Your breath to mine" from its creator, but I bet Nightblood could get at it. Then it'd collapse and all you'd have left is a corpse, same as if Nightblood "ate" a human wielder of all Investiture, I suppose.

Only standard lifeless are made using the one breath command and a single corpse.  A vast verity of lifeless exist and they can be animated with far more breath.  You could even just give a lifeless soldier addition breath from a your breath to my command to fuel Nightblood.

[+robardin]

1 hour ago, Karger said:

Only standard lifeless are made using the one breath command and a single corpse.  A vast verity of lifeless exist and they can be animated with far more breath.  You could even just give a lifeless soldier addition breath from a your breath to my command to fuel Nightblood.

I was picturing the latter. Taking an existing army of Lifeless and arming them with Nightblood-like weapons would simply involve giving them extra Breath and telling them to go somewhere or to someone, on some condition, then to draw their NBlade and start whacking. You could probably even Command them well enough to sheathe the NBlade when they got close to running down, to then come back to base for more Breath.

Edited April 3, 2020 by robardin