The murals, the Bands, and the other artifacts at the Temple of the Sovereign (Bands of Mourning spoilers)

[+robardin]

A number of things about that Temple of the Sovereign don't add up, even after you realize a lot of it was complete misdirection from our old friend Kelsier. Or rather, ESPECIALLY after I realized that... I started to think of what else might have been being misdirected away from.

It's been established that Kelsier was the Sovereign, and that he wished to make it seem like the actions he took in the Southern Hemisphere - imparting Metalborn among them in the Firefathers and Firemothers, teaching them medallion technology with the Excisors - were somehow done by The Lord Ruler.

Part of this obfuscation involved repeating iconography known to the Northerners as the Bands of Mourning - the metalmind armband bracers worn by The Lord Ruler, and described as having folklore associated with them even before the Catacendre as granting "all his powers" to the wearer. Meanwhile to the Southerners, to who he presented as The Sovereign, he gave an origin story of being the former god-king of the Northern Hemisphere, and imparted understanding of the same object - with similar iconography, as arm bracers  - that functioned as medallions for all the metals: something that only he could create.

Then he left "with his priests" to make this Temple, where he took great care to construct an elaborate distraction play, with a series of complex booby traps and doors that could only be opened once in a lifetime if you got the code wrong, leading to an apse with a raised pedestal with a broken display case... And underneath this apse, catacombs with a set of arm bracers of different metals, that was a dummy (empty of attributes, if they ever held any at all), somewhat grimly surrounded by the dead bodies of his former Southerner priests.

Meanwhile, the real "Bands" of sixteen unsealed metalminds were melded into the spearhead attached to the statue of the Sovereign outside the temple - a statue that to the Northerners, matched their expectations of what The Lord Ruler looked like.

It took Hoid's coppermind coin thrown to Wax to reveal that the Sovereign was actually Kelsier, the Survivor of Hathsin - and a WoB to confirm that Hoid was doing so specifically to "blow Kelsier's cover story", that that coppermind was something Kelsier "did not want to get out". (Of course, he must have been the one to have created it in the first place, so, how's that?)

That is all just a recap. What I wanted to bring up was a review of the murals described at that Temple, and what they were supposed to represent, to either a Northerner or Southerner viewing them. Seeing what Kelsier did, it's possible they were meant to suggest one thing to a Northern viewer (wrt lore pertaining to TLR), and another thing to a Southern viewer (wrt The Sovereign).

ReLuur's evanotypes of the Temple, as shown to Wax, Wayne, and Marasi in Chapter 3, showed:

• A mural... depicted a room with a central dais in the shape of a truncated pyramid. Set upon a pedestal on the dais was a pair of bracers made of delicate, curling metal, shaped in spirals. [This was to create a visual misdirection of what the Bands were?]
• A large metal plate set into a wall and inscribed with a strange script. [This was the puzzle Suit got Wax and co. past, with info from Jordis.]
• A statue that resembled the Lord Ruler, bearing a long spear. [hahaha.]
• Another shot of the mural, more detailed, which depicted bracers with many different metals twining together... "bracers for a Full Feruchemist."
• A different mural... depicted a man standing atop a peak, hands raised above him and a glowing spear hovering there, just beyond his touch. A corpse slumped at his feet. ... The face of the man in the mosaic had eyes upturned and lips parted as if in awe at what he held. He wore the bracers on his arms.

Since ReLuur didn't actually get past the plate set in the wall to the "real" dais, the mural depicting the room with the dais and the pedestal and the bracers on it must have been outside.

1 - What is the deal with the mural of The Sovereign and a floating glowing spear, with the corpse at his feet? That obviously made the Northerners think of corpse = Kelsier, awesome powa bracer-wearing dude = TLR, glowing spear = the holy Lance of the Fountains of Survivorist lore. What were the Southerners thinking it showed?

2 - Are the "fake bracers" actually fake, or just empty? They are described as "silvery" when Edwarn hands them over to Telsin, not made of bands of many metals. What if instead of being the Bands, they are "Excisors"? Wouldn't that be just like Kelsier!

3 - Why were those dead priests down there, surrounding the "fake Bands" in concentric circles? As I was just speculating, perhaps they weren't fake. But it still seems rather gruesome for Kelsier to demand that "his priests" kill themselves in building this secret temple, that's not like him (or not like how we remember him from Era 1).

So... What if they weren't (human) priests? Some of the bodies were described as having "shattered" with the cave-in triggered by Suit. What if they were kandra, and what he saw as "shattered" were the ones wearing funky skeletons instead of ones of human bones?

I've always wondered what happened to the First and non-traitorous Second Generation of kandra, and speculated on the First Generation potentially still having Spiritwebs allowing for Feruchemy if they ever regained humanity (since that's how they were originally born)... And being tired enough to want to pass on of their own choice, decided to do it this way? Plus, the Southerners evidently did have legends of divine kandra-like beings, despite them being creations of the Lord Ruler. How would that have happened? Hmmm. Is that speculating waaayyy too far?

4 - The aluminum belt around the statue of the Sovereign - Wax later checked it as having "no kind of charge", but he couldn't exactly determine that by using Steelsight or Pushing on it, yeah? In fact, being unable to Steelsee or Push on the spearhead is exactly what made him originally think it, too, was aluminum. Now that he can examine it closely he can probably see it really is composed of (or at least, plated with) aluminum and nothing else - but what if it's an unsealed aluminummind, and he just hadn't thought of that (which is why it didn't open up to work for him)? An aluminummind storing... Identity? Of Kelsier? (Maybe it's not unsealed or unkeyed but just a straight up aluminummind he'll need to get back someday!)

5 - Why create such a powerful artifact, and then abandon it? That really, really doesn't sound like Kelsier. He's very goal-oriented, and whatever his goal was in doing all these shenanigans, it's hard to imagine they wouldn't be easier to achieve with the Bands of Mourning. Was its creation part of a larger Plan, perhaps with Harmony's blessing or involvement, and doing what he did was part of the price of his returning to the Physical Realm in some way?

6 - Once you have the Bands, couldn't you simply make any number of more Bands (limited only by the ability to procure all the different metals)? Why didn't Kelsier do that, or why isn't Wax and co. looking to do that?

[ftl]

Oof. These are super interesting questions. I think you're onto something, but i just don't know what.

Really gets at the question of what was kelsier doing. We know he wanted to survive and make himself a body - he did that. We know that he went and helped the southern scadrians survive - maybe out of the goodness of his heart, or maybe because he wanted to lead a religion for some purpose of his. But what could he want?

I like the theory that the "fake" bands were also significant, as are the various other bits of metal around the temple.

[Kingsdaughter613]

Letting someone he hates take the credit is also very unlike Kell.
 

We don’t actually know what Hoid wanted to reveal with the Coppermind; only that something in it was something Kell didn’t want getting out. That Kelsier had remained active cannot be the reason, because the Survivorists already believed he was. That Survivor and Sovereign are the same... maybe. But the memory continues beyond the point where Wax dropped the coin...

Alik is not the most accurate source of info. He says ‘yes?’ when the groups mentions the Lord Ruler, which always indicated confusion to me. Plus there’s a double translation issue going on: Whatever Kell told the Southerners got translated and then whatever Alik says gets translated.

Some words/concepts come across very differently in different cultures. ‘King’ would mean something very different to a people who lack one. For example: Kell could have said something like ‘I was the leader of the Skaa,’ which translates to Jarl (Earl/Prince, but in the old Germanic sense), which backwards translates to King (because NScadrial lacks Princes)... but isn’t what was actually said at all. I want to know what the exact words used were. Note that South Scadrial shouldn’t have had the concept of a king, based on how their society appears to have been shaped.

Also, if Kell didn’t want people to figure it out, why all the spear imagery? He definitely wanted people to think the Bands were the Lord Rulers, but I’m not so certain he wanted them to think the Sovereign was.

There’s something off about the whole situation...

Next time I get to ask Brandon a question, I’m asking if Konig or Jarl would be more accurate to Allik’s intent.

As an aside, the statue is useless for analysis purposes. It’s stone, on a mountain with regular snowstorms. Wind and water erosion mean the features should be too vague to tell who the statue is meant to be of. Wax and co. assumed it was of the person they expected, but there’s no way to say from the statue itself. If the statue IS truly intact... I want to know which magic system did it and how.

 

We need WAY more information.

[+robardin]

5 hours ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

Letting someone he hates take the credit is also very unlike Kell.

We don’t actually know what Hoid wanted to reveal with the Coppermind; only that something in it was something Kell didn’t want getting out. That Kelsier had remained active cannot be the reason, because the Survivorists already believed he was. That Survivor and Sovereign are the same... maybe. But the memory continues beyond the point where Wax dropped the coin...

Alik is not the most accurate source of info. He says ‘yes?’ when the groups mentions the Lord Ruler, which always indicated confusion to me. Plus there’s a double translation issue going on: Whatever Kell told the Southerners got translated and then whatever Alik says gets translated.

Some words/concepts come across very differently in different cultures. ‘King’ would mean something very different to a people who lack one. For example: Kell could have said something like ‘I was the leader of the Skaa,’ which translates to Jarl (Earl/Prince, but in the old Germanic sense), which backwards translates to King (because NScadrial lacks Princes)... but isn’t what was actually said at all. I want to know what the exact words used were. Note that South Scadrial shouldn’t have had the concept of a king, based on how their society appears to have been shaped.

Also, if Kell didn’t want people to figure it out, why all the spear imagery? He definitely wanted people to think the Bands were the Lord Rulers, but I’m not so certain he wanted them to think the Sovereign was.

There’s something off about the whole situation...

Next time I get to ask Brandon a question, I’m asking if Konig or Jarl would be more accurate to Allik’s intent.

As an aside, the statue is useless for analysis purposes. It’s stone, on a mountain with regular snowstorms. Wind and water erosion mean the features should be too vague to tell who the statue is meant to be of. Wax and co. assumed it was of the person they expected, but there’s no way to say from the statue itself. If the statue IS truly intact... I want to know which magic system did it and how.

We need WAY more information.

Yep yep yep on all the bolded stuff.... And they raise further questions, of course.

It seems likely that the coppermind coin's "big reveal" is Kelsier's "going down South" in physical form; but even if it wasn't, there's still the one-level-deeper question: if whatever is contained in that coppermind reveals something that Kelsier "didn't want to get out", why did he create the coppermind in the first place - and as an unsealed medallion, at that? It is a first person memory, so at some point he intentionally offloaded it to an unsealed coppermind.

Oh, and then there was the comment from Devlin, the Ghostblood-sounding informant at Lady Kelesina's party in New Seraan with his talk of predator and prey, when Wax showed him that coppermind coin. Devlin said that "Though I've never seen the exact image on this one, coins like these have been moving with some regularity through black-market antiquities auctions. ... I've been baffled as to why. There is no reason to keep them secret, and it would not be illegal to sell them in the open. ... Gave bought a few, then immediately stopped, and the pieces he purchased are no longer on display in his home". 

These would not be "medallions" the Southerners had on their crashed airships and seized by the Set, so where did they come from? Also Hoid? Are they copies of the same coppermind as he threw at Wax? Coppermind coins at all? Did Gave get one of them to work?

As for the double translation error thing, I think I commented in another thread about how the pun of "bands" as armbands and "ha ha, they're bands of interwoven metal (in the spearhead)!" was another sign to the Northerners, as that pun almost certainly wouldn't translate, haha. (Of course it could also just be Sanderson's pun to the IRL readers, like with the very names of Wax and Wayne, when it turns out Scadrial doesn't have a moon at all).

Still, Allik saying the Sovereign told us "he was your king first, and your god" is pretty specific. Two separate words, one for "king" (ruler, leader) and one for "god".

Also, this:

Quote

 

"The Lord Ruler?" Waxillium asked. "He died."

"Yes," Allik said. "He told us that too."

 

(Of course, Kelsier had also died, so that wasn't a lie, technically. It just didn't take.)

And to expand on my kandra suspicions, Jordis and the others seemed to recognize kandra as divine agents. When MeLaan turned transparent to show her shattered skeletal parts and then taking the Bands into her body, Allik had the right terms to convey something about MeLaan to them in their own language - Wax and the others couldn't follow his explanation because he'd removed the Connection medallion. So who knows what their Southerner lore has about kandra? (And... How would they have known?)

MeLaan seemed to know to do that at just the right time - did she understand their language, or did she just follow a cue to "do the thing" when Allik gestured wildly in her direction?

Edited August 28, 2020 by robardin

[Kingsdaughter613]

On 8/28/2020 at 9:04 AM, robardin said:

Yep yep yep on all the bolded stuff.... And they raise further questions, of course.

It seems likely that the coppermind coin's "big reveal" is Kelsier's "going down South" in physical form; but even if it wasn't, there's still the one-level-deeper question: if whatever is contained in that coppermind reveals something that Kelsier "didn't want to get out", why did he create the coppermind in the first place - and as an unsealed medallion, at that? It is a first person memory, so at some point he intentionally offloaded it to an unsealed coppermind.

Oh, and then there was the comment from Devlin, the Ghostblood-sounding informant at Lady Kelesina's party in New Seraan with his talk of predator and prey, when Wax showed him that coppermind coin. Devlin said that "Though I've never seen the exact image on this one, coins like these have been moving with some regularity through black-market antiquities auctions. ... I've been baffled as to why. There is no reason to keep them secret, and it would not be illegal to sell them in the open. ... Gave bought a few, then immediately stopped, and the pieces he purchased are no longer on display in his home". 

These would not be "medallions" the Southerners had on their crashed airships and seized by the Set, so where did they come from? Also Hoid? Are they copies of the same coppermind as he threw at Wax? Coppermind coins at all? Did Gave get one of them to work?

As for the double translation error thing, I think I commented in another thread about how the pun of "bands" as armbands and "ha ha, they're bands of interwoven metal (in the spearhead)!" was another sign to the Northerners, as that pun almost certainly wouldn't translate, haha. (Of course it could also just be Sanderson's pun to the IRL readers, like with the very names of Wax and Wayne, when it turns out Scadrial doesn't have a moon at all).

Still, Allik saying the Sovereign told us "he was your king first, and your god" is pretty specific. Two separate words, one for "king" (ruler, leader) and one for "god".

Also, this:

(Of course, Kelsier had also died, so that wasn't a lie, technically. It just didn't take.)

And to expand on my kandra suspicions, Jordis and the others seemed to recognize kandra as divine agents. When MeLaan turned transparent to show her shattered skeletal parts and then taking the Bands into her body, Allik had the right terms to convey something about MeLaan to them in their own language - Wax and the others couldn't follow his explanation because he'd removed the Connection medallion. So who knows what their Southerner lore has about kandra? (And... How would they have known?)

MeLaan seemed to know to do that at just the right time - did she understand their language, or did she just follow a cue to "do the thing" when Allik gestured wildly in her direction?

The memory in the Coppermind continues. What if it reveals that Kell had a Southern family? He might not want that known, but then the medallions become something he left for his kids. Obviously, this is a totally random guess, but I find Kell being the Sovereign too obvious, particularly when Gold-healing means he couldn’t even dye his hair - and he didn’t bother to hide his scars at all!

 

Regarding translation: that’s why I mentioned Konig vs. Jarl. A Jarl was a chieftan, leader of a tribe or Princedom. A Konig is a king. Based on the societal structure of Southern Scadrians, they were more likely to have Jarlene than Konige. (I’m using the Germanic names, as SoScads seem to have a Germanic language.) 
 

North Scadrial lacks the concept of a Princedom. King could easily be the closest translation to Jarl, but a LOT of things could translate to Jarl.