Nightblood

[Hoid the Former Drifter]

What is nightblood made out of and which magic system is it (he?) from originally?

[Quantus]

Warbreaker serves as something of his origin story, or at least contains what we know of his origins. 

Short answer is that he's a rare/unique type of Awakened Item (Type IV), of the magic from the planet Nalthis, where Endowment lives.  The sheath is Aluminum, and the blade was originally Steel before it was Awakened.

Edited October 8, 2020 by Quantus

[Hoid the Former Drifter]

30 minutes ago, Quantus said:

The sheath is Aluminum

figures

30 minutes ago, Quantus said:

the blade was originally Steel before it was Awakened.

how do you know? (i'm asking, not challenging)

31 minutes ago, Quantus said:

(Type IV)

meaning?

[Quantus]

8 minutes ago, Hoid the Drifter said:

figures

how do you know? (i'm asking, not challenging)

Vasher refers to it as "Awakened Steel" at one point in Warbreaker.

8 minutes ago, Hoid the Drifter said:

meaning?

By the local/in-world classification of the Magic System:  

• Type I are defined as "Spontaneous Sentient BioChromatic Manifestations in a Deceased Host" (IE "Returned", made by Divine Intervention only)
• Type II are defined as "Mindless Manifestations in a Deceased Host" (ie "Lifeless", awakened Zombies)
• Type III are "BioChromatic manifestation in an organic host far removed from being alive". They are Mindless.  Examples include Awakened ropes, cloth, or skeletal remains. 
• Type IV are "sentient objects made by Awakening inorganic materials like metal and stone".

 

Nightblood was the first such, and the secret of his creation has both caused and ended wars.  He is kind of the cosmere equivalent of artificial intelligence, having been described as a "Robot Spren".  Those who made him were Worldhoppers who had seen Rosharan Shardblades and were attempting to replicated them using Awakening (having no idea how they were actually "made").  Most of this comes from various WOBs.

[Hoid the Former Drifter]

1 minute ago, Quantus said:

Type IV are "sentient objects made by Awakening inorganic materials like metal and stone".

as are the stone lifeless? confused about what they are actually...

[Honorless]

26 minutes ago, Hoid the Drifter said:

how do you know? (i'm asking, not challenging)

It was mentioned in the book, iirc

26 minutes ago, Hoid the Drifter said:

meaning?

https://coppermind.net/wiki/Awakening

[Hoid the Former Drifter]

2 minutes ago, Honorless said:

https://coppermind.net/wiki/Awakening

well, that explains his obsession with evil

[Quantus]

1 minute ago, Hoid the Drifter said:

as are the stone lifeless? confused about what they are actually...

Kind of a Warbreaker Plot spoiler, but:

Spoiler

They are actually just normal Skeletons that were then encased in Stone serving as armor. The organic bones are what was awakened, as far as we know using the normal Lifeless Commands, and there are seems at the joints.  They were an unconventional approach, and using stone-over-bone made them last far longer that other designs and not require the Ichor that was such a big boon to other nations.  But they are still "mindless" like the other Lifeless, rather than being truly Sapient and capable of conversation like Nightblood.

Spoiler filled WOB:

Spoiler

 

Quote

 

DylanHuebner

I was wondering how the animation of the lifeless statues worked, in regard to the use of Susebron's Breath. If they were lifeless, then vasher wouldn't have been able to take his Breath back out of them, nor would susebron have needed such a great deal of breath to revive them—he just would have needed a password. But if they were simply Awakened, no password would have been necessary to animate the statues, just Breath and Command.

It seems like the statues could be neither lifeless nor awakened. Are they unique, because of the use of bone, or am I missing something? The only other explanation I could think of was that they were lifeless, but Susebron's breath wasn't used to activate the statues, he simply had it passed down from vasher, in addition to the statues. If that's the case(and then I've simply been confusing myself with unnecessary, convoluted logic), why was it necessary to keep the breath safe for all these years?

Brandon Sanderson

Wow, there are a lot of questions in there. If you follow the drafts, I think you can see the evolution of what became of the Lifeless army. Originally I had planned for the statues to simply have been placed there so that you could Awaken them—just in my original concepts, before I started the writing—and then that became the army.

I eventually decided that didn't work for various reasons. Number one, as I developed the magic system, Awakening stone doesn't work very well. You've got to have limberness, you've got to have motion to something for it to actually be stronger. So a soldier made out of cloth would be more useful to you than a soldier made out of stone, if you were just Awakening something. At that point, as I was developing this, I went back to the drawing board and said okay, I need to leave him a whole group of really cool Lifeless as the army. But that had problems in that the ichor would not have stayed good long enough. Plus they already had a pretty big Lifeless army, so what was special about this one? Remember, I'm revising concepts like this as the book is going along. You can see where in the story I could see what needed to be there. So I went back to the drawing board again.

I think the original draft of WARBREAKER you can download off my website has them just as statues, though at the time when I was writing that I already knew it would need to change. I was just sticking to my outline because I needed to have the whole thing complete on the page before I could work with it. A lot of times that's how I do things as a writer—I get the rough draft down, and then I begin to sculpt.

I eventually developed essentially what you've just outlined in the first part, before you started worrying if you were too convoluted. I said, well, what if there's a hybrid? What happens if you Awaken bones? Can you create something? The reason that you can't draw the Breath back from a Lifeless is because the Breath clings to it. If the Lifeless were sentient enough, it could give up its own Breath, but you can't take it, just like you can't take a Breath from a person by force. You have to get them to give it up willingly. So it sticks to the Lifeless. A Lifeless is, let's say, 90% of a sentient being. The Breath doesn't manifest in them, because they aren't alive, yet they're almost there. A stone statue brought to life would be way down on the bottom rung.

Is there something in between? That's the advancement I had Vasher discover—what if we build something out of bone, but then encase it in stone to make it strong, and build it in ways that the bone is held together by the force of the Breaths? That's really what you're getting at there, that you need a lot of Breath, a lot of power, to hold all that stone together. There are seams at the joints. What the Breath is doing is clinging there like magical sinew, and it's holding all of that together.

Vasher left the Phantoms Invested with enough Breath to hold them together but not to move. You needed another big, substantial influx of Breath in order to actually make them have motion, to bring them enough strength to move and that sort of thing. So it's kind of a hybrid.

Goodreads Fantasy Book Discussion Warbreaker Q&A (Jan. 18, 2010)

 

 

 

 

 

[RShara]

15 hours ago, Hoid the Drifter said:

What is nightblood made out of and which magic system is it (he?) from originally?

If you haven't read Warbreaker, I would highly recommend it! It's a good book, and it explains a lot about Nightblood, and a couple other characters you might have seen. Then read the Annotations, because they're like a whole 1/3 more book. Warbreaker and the Annotations are free on Brandon's website.

[Hoid the Former Drifter]

On 10/9/2020 at 3:20 AM, RShara said:

If you haven't read Warbreaker, I would highly recommend it! It's a good book, and it explains a lot about Nightblood, and a couple other characters you might have seen. Then read the Annotations, because they're like a whole 1/3 more book. Warbreaker and the Annotations are free on Brandon's website.

i have read it, but i was confused.

[trav]

On 9.10.2020 at 10:20 AM, RShara said:

and it explains a lot about Nightblood

quite a liberal use of the phrase. outside of secondary source we get not much information on Nightblood in the book.

we only know it used to be steel (according to Vasher) and that it took 1000 breaths to make. both answer OPs question though.

steel and breath. tada.

 

what we can guess is that Nightblood is able to learn and progress. Vasher thinks it can't, but its very apparent.

 

https://wob.coppermind.net/adv_search/?tags=nightblood

[RShara]

6 hours ago, trav said:

quite a liberal use of the phrase. outside of secondary source we get not much information on Nightblood in the book.

we only know it used to be steel (according to Vasher) and that it took 1000 breaths to make. both answer OPs question though.

steel and breath. tada.

 

what we can guess is that Nightblood is able to learn and progress. Vasher thinks it can't, but its very apparent.

 

https://wob.coppermind.net/adv_search/?tags=nightblood

We learn who made him, what he was made of, what Command he was given, how many Breaths he started with, and approximately when he was made. I think that's a pretty big chunk of information?