Spiking a dead body

[Phlipz1]

Question in the title:

Can you use a spike on a dead body? As in if an allomancer was killed, could you grab the right spike and steal the power from their dead body?

I know it is essentially ripping off a piece of the spiritweb, so it may not work. But it's an interesting question for me

[Quantus]

If they are only "Mostly Dead" then yes.  If their soul has passed to the Beyond (which even Shards cannot reach) then No, but up to that point (where Healing can work, etc) they are still intact.   But without some outside Investiture we're talking a matter of minutes not days.  I suspect there's similar (if slower) transition to what happens to a corpse when hit with a shardblade (where the first cut treats it like a person, and the second like a pile of meat). 

 

 

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Lady Radagu

Does being the donor of a Hemalurgic spike have any implications for your afterlife? Or how about the recipient?

Brandon Sanderson

That is actually going to depend on-- Okay. Yes it has implications for the afterlife. Yes.

Lady Radagu

Okay so are there a bunch of Scadrian souls wandering the afterlife with holes in their personalities or memory or identity? Or some with extra parts tacked on?

Brandon Sanderson

So it has implications, but they are not exactly ones that you are assuming. So in the cosmere there is "dead" and "mostly dead". Okay? And this has been shown several times so once someone dies there is a period before they transition. Sazed talks about this in Mistborn 3. And so most of the implications are for before transition. Does that make sense? Post-transition you are going to have to ask the philosophers and the theologians who are the ones that talk about that. So there is an afterlife and an after-afterlife. Not as many implications for after-afterlife. Middle? Yes. Okay?

Firefight release party (Jan. 5, 2015)

 

 

[Honorless]

Yup

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Wyrmhero (paraphrased)

Can you could Hemalurgically spike a dead thing, similar to how Breath goes into dead things? Could you spike a Lifeless?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes, if there was enough of the soul left for the spike to take.

London signing (Aug. 4, 2014)

Death on all three Realms isn't instantaneous. After the Physical body dies, the Cognitive mind self lingers on for a while before getting pulled into the Beyond, and the Spiritweb also remains lingering for a while, still tethered with its Connections till it finally dissolves. So if you're quick enough & skilled enough, you could spike a dead body. I imagine the Hemalurgic decay rate might increase as the person was already dead, otherwise the Inquisitors wouldn't have bothered keeping their victims alive for as long as possible for the whole process. Though that might just have been sadism due to the mindset the Final Empire inculcated in the nobles, their fractured psyche, Ruin's influence...

[Phlipz1]

thank you everyone!