Sand Mastery: Underrated?

[+robardin]

I was thinking about White Sand earlier today, and I realized that of all the Cosmere magic systems we see, Sand Mastery is the one I have never imagined myself using. Well, except when making sand castles at the beach, but that's not very often.

A large part of that is because to be at all useful, a Sand Master needs sand. Lots and lots of sand. And not just any sand, like the sand on an Earth beach, but the particular white sand of Taldain, white because it has absorbed Investiture from the Taldain sun.

Ha ha, I thought; For all the endless arguments about Prepared Mistborn vs. Knight Radiant of the Nth Ideal, on a battlefield or in an arena or in a city, nobody ever mentally matches someone off-world up with Kenton, because unless it happens on Dayside Taldain he'd soon just be a guy holding the largest size bag of now-black sand he could carry with him. WEAK!

...or is that true?

We have a WoB that that sand turns white not just from the sun of Taldain, but because tiny organisms in it react to Kinetic Investiture.

Quote

...if you let it fade and you take it somewhere, as soon as Investiture goes kinetic, it'll turn white again. So you'll be able to use it to tell who's using Inve-- it works just like a Seeker, like bronze pulses...

So having white sand, having sand around is really good. If you can keep the little beasties that are growing on the sand around, they will react to basically the Investiture equivalent of radiation. So that's handy.

Consider what the sand is doing in the White Sand works: absorbing Investiture from the sun of Taldain, the radiated Light of Autonomy. The "seeker organisms" are reacting to that act of storage by changing color, as they evidently do with any act of Investiture moving from one place to another, so the sand being "white" is due to that, but where the magic actually comes from is the power of Autonomy now resident in the sand. The color is an indicator, a reflection of its availability, not its cause.

Effectively, that means the sand of Taldain (ex-organisms) are like tiny little solar battery cells for Investiture.

And per this WoB, any Investiture would charge the sand and make it masterable:

Quote

Questioner (paraphrased)

Can a Highstorm recharge sand from Taldain, and would that sand be charged with Stormlight or would it be masterable?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

It would recharge the sand, and it would be masterable, not Stormlight

American Fork High School Signing (Dec. 12, 2019)

What else are "battery cells for Investiture"? Metalminds and Shardblades.

If what is special about the sand of Taldain is that they're "tiny generic Investiture batteries with micro-organisms in them that act as indicators of Kinetic Investiture", then who's to say the ability of Sand Mastery is only called such because it occurs on Taldain, where the only Investiture is from their sun and the only repository for it is in that sand?

In other words... Could Kenton "master" Shardblades and metalminds???? EVEN NIGHTBLOOD?

 

ETA: I'm mostly joking here, because I read that last WoB where a highstorm would "recharge" the sand "but not be Stormlight" to mean it wouldn't be like Stormlight being captured in a gemstone such that a Radiant could use it, but that it would make the sand white and be masterable (convert the Investiture to something Kenton could leverage to manipulate the particle of sand). Implying that there is still something intrinsic about the sand particles that are entwined with Sand Mastery in the mechanism.

Still, as far as I can read it, the door is technically still open to say that Sand Mastery is actually Investiture Battery Mastery, which would make Kenton a LOT more powerful off-world than anybody gives him credit for. Shardblade? Shardplate? Compounding-filled metalminds on a Fullborn? Nightblood? HAHAHA! I Master You All!

Edited December 29, 2020 by robardin

[Kingsdaughter613]

1 hour ago, robardin said:

I was thinking about White Sand earlier today, and I realized that of all the Cosmere magic systems we see, Sand Mastery is the one I have never imagined myself using. Well, except when making sand castles at the beach, but that's not very often.

A large part of that is because to be at all useful, a Sand Master needs sand. Lots and lots of sand. And not just any sand, like the sand on an Earth beach, but the particular white sand of Taldain, white because it has absorbed Investiture from the Taldain sun.

Ha ha, I thought; For all the endless arguments about Prepared Mistborn vs. Knight Radiant of the Nth Ideal, on a battlefield or in an arena or in a city, nobody ever mentally matches someone off-world up with Kenton, because unless it happens on Dayside Taldain he'd soon just be a guy holding the largest size bag of now-black sand he could carry with him. WEAK!

...or is that true?

We have a WoB that that sand turns white not just from the sun of Taldain, but because tiny organisms in it react to Kinetic Investiture.

Consider what the sand is doing in the White Sand works: absorbing Investiture from the sun of Taldain, the radiated Light of Autonomy. The "seeker organisms" are reacting to that act of storage by changing color, as they evidently do with any act of Investiture moving from one place to another, so the sand being "white" is due to that, but where the magic actually comes from is the power of Autonomy now resident in the sand. The color is an indicator, a reflection of its availability, not its cause.

Effectively, that means the sand of Taldain (ex-organisms) are like tiny little solar battery cells for Investiture.

And per this WoB, any Investiture would charge the sand and make it masterable:

What else are "battery cells for Investiture"? Metalminds and Shardblades.

If what is special about the sand of Taldain is that they're "tiny generic Investiture batteries with micro-organisms in them that act as indicators of Kinetic Investiture", then who's to say the ability of Sand Mastery is only called such because it occurs on Taldain, where the only Investiture is from their sun and the only repository for it is in that sand?

In other words... Could Kenton "master" Shardblades and metalminds???? EVEN NIGHTBLOOD?

 

ETA: I'm mostly joking here, because I read that last WoB where a highstorm would "recharge" the sand "but not be Stormlight" to mean it wouldn't be like Stormlight being captured in a gemstone such that a Radiant could use it, but that it would make the sand white and be masterable (convert the Investiture to something Kenton could leverage to manipulate the particle of sand). Implying that there is still something intrinsic about the sand particles that are entwined with Sand Mastery in the mechanism.

Still, as far as I can read it, the door is technically still open to say that Sand Mastery is actually Investiture Battery Mastery, which would make Kenton a LOT more powerful off-world than anybody gives him credit for. Shardblade? Shardplate? Compounding-filled metalminds on a Fullborn? Nightblood? HAHAHA! I Master You All!

Better question: what if you could get the little beasties to grown on SOMETHING ELSE?

[StanLemon]

1 hour ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

Better question: what if you could get the little beasties to grown on SOMETHING ELSE?

Maybe that's what the plants on Elantris are

[Halyo_Alex]

5 hours ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

Better question: what if you could get the little beasties to grown on SOMETHING ELSE?

make a paste out of... wait, no that would make them wet.

...Unless you could use like, straight Ethyl Alcohol or something without water in it.

Then you could stick people with stuff you can telekinesis around the place.

[teknopathetic]

Sand mastery can be used to construct buildings somehow, so there is that. I feel like the people of Taldain did not explore that to the fullest. If the mastery could be used to make something permanent that would sure open a lot of doors. 

Edited December 30, 2020 by teknopathetic

[Halyo_Alex]

2 hours ago, teknopathetic said:

Sand mastery can be used to construct buildings somehow, so there is that. I feel like the people of Taldain did not explore that to the fullest. If the mastery could be used to make something permanent that would sure open a lot of doors. 

White Cement? Cement does use Sand in it...

But again, that hinges on using Water as an ingredient to make it cure and harden..... Hrrrmm...

[+robardin]

14 hours ago, teknopathetic said:

Sand mastery can be used to construct buildings somehow, so there is that. I feel like the people of Taldain did not explore that to the fullest. If the mastery could be used to make something permanent that would sure open a lot of doors. 

But does it only work on the specific sand on Taldain? That's the most limiting thing about Sand Mastery, not its versatility, though even there it's limited to direct, physical effects that can you make the sand do - unless there are ways to use it to do things like alter memories, heal oneself or another person, form Connection to another person for language translation or other purposes, etc. Add on top of that the likely limitation that you have to be on Taldain or carry around its sand with you off-world to do stuff, and it is a very circumscribed form of Cosmere magic.

The "out" for Sand Mastery not being the weakest form of magic we've seen so far - the Selish magics seem to be limited by being bound to physical regions of Sel, but multiple WoBs indicate that that can be worked around with the right techniques - would be if its fundamental mechanics were more universal, like being able to manipulate Invested things in a way that is difficult or impossible for other magics.

Or perhaps the uses of Sand Mastery we've seen are simply reflective of how the Sand Masters of Taldain have needed to use it in their history. Being on a planet (side) covered in white sand, maybe they've never done any kind of research of any subtle use of it to do other, non-physical things, or to maximize what can be done with small amounts of sand versus rather than small amounts of raw ability.

For that matter, Realmatically speaking what does it mean for one Sand Master to be able to "command more ribbons" than another, or for Kenton was able to level up so much (which apparently had never happened before)? Hmm! The only other Cosmere magic we've seen where being innately or naturally "stronger" than another, rather than more skilled in its use or having a bigger stockpile of Investiture (Breath, Stormlight, metalminds), is with Allomancy - where the natural and maximum levels of strength of one's Pushes and Pulls depends on some level of sDNA based Connection with Preservation.

That, and the advancing in Ideals by a Radiant, of course. Is that an analogy for what happened to Kenton?

[Thanatos]

Sand Mastery was used to create the pyramids... ohh no, ive said to much!!

[Criggleworth]

There's still the magic of the Darkside of Taldain- I swear I remember seeing it called something like Shifting Colors. Khriss notes at one point that the lichen is on Darkside as well. Could be that, if the lichen is charged, a Sand Master could throw around anything covered in the lichen.

Sand Mastery strikes me as more similar to Aviar and the disease magic of Ashyn. Honestly, it almost feels like it's not from a world with a Shard in residence. I've wondered if Autonomy actually "resides" in the star while Taldain only has an avatar.

[Honorless]

On 12/30/2020 at 9:18 PM, robardin said:

But does it only work on the specific sand on Taldain?

Probably not, it's not the sand that's special, nor Autonomy's Investiture but the microorganisms, so if you can culture them and probably hack Connection with Taldain and fiddle with Spiritweb so you can do the temporary Bonds with them, you can do Sand Mastery too