[Theory] What Happened to the Mistwraiths

[Cocoa]

We know what happened to the main 'peoples' of Scadrial from Era 1 during the catascendre: the human citizens of the Final Empire were gathered together in the Elendel Basin, with the adaptations that Rashek had built into them to survive the ash reversed and the damage to their bodies healed. The koloss were changed to be a pseudo-truebreeding race, giving birth to koloss-blooded. The kandra simply had their spikes and intelligence returned. Later, we find out that the Southern Scadrians also existed off-screen, and were not given any special adaptations we know of at this moment apart from Kelsier's aid (though how they have access to feruchemy in the first place is not yet confirmed).

But what about the other fantasy trapping of the Final Empire, the mistwraiths? The few surviving kandra aside, mistwraiths are conspicuously absent from Era 2. It's possible that they were simply destroyed in the remaking of the world or couldn't adapt to the new environment since they weren't originally created to be a part of it, but that seems an unusual choice for Harmony considering all the care he put into Preserving what he could. So, where'd they go?

Well, as we've seen with the Southern Scadrians, the residents of the Basin really don't know what's out there beyond the horizon, in no small part due to their hesitancy to explore and expand. And we also know that the first mistwraiths were created when Rashek transformed the then-current Feruchemists of the world to try to eliminate the possibility of there being other Fullborn who could challenge him. So what if Harmony turned them back into humans, and relocated them to a remote part of Scadrial where they wouldn't yet have been encountered by the people of the Basin (and, likely, not the Southern Scadrians either)?

Problem: Why would Harmony turn the mistwraiths into humans, if he didn't do the same for the kandra and the koloss? Solution: Because unlike the non-sentient mistwraiths, the kandra and koloss had developed their own societies and identities in the time since they were created. We know from Bands of Mourning that an individual kandra's mind is reliant on their specific spikes, so it's quite possible that turning the kandra back into humans would have wiped clean their unique personalities and identities. And likewise, he might have considered restoring koloss to their pre-Hemalurgy forms and minds as 'killing' their current selves. The mistwraiths, meanwhile, would not have had any culture or individuality to erase or overwrite.

Problem: If Harmony did return the mistwraiths' lost humanity, why didn't he put them in the South or the Basin with everyone else? Solution: There are a few reason I can think of. The first is that they didn't have their own culture or identity, so Harmony was curious to see how they would develop without outside human interference. Even if he gave them adult intelligence and basic knowledge, they would still be newborn as a people. The second is that, since all the original mistwraiths were Feruchemists, there's a solid chance that full feruchemy would be widespread if not outright omnipresent in the formerly-mistwraith population, and he didn't want to risk them out-competing the people of the South or the Basin. And the last possibility is a bit of a mix of the first two; the former mistwraiths would probably be one if not both of naive and powerful. With those traits, Harmony might have been concerned about other humans taking advantage of and oppressing them before they found their footing.

[Eternal Khol]

40 minutes ago, Cocoa said:

It's possible that they were simply destroyed in the remaking of the world

 i think this is the most likely answer

the Kandra population was never actually that large. Even mistwraiths were considered myth/folktale to most of the general populace(iirc?)

Then the world literally began burning before sazed took the power. He notes how trees started to just catch fire. Any Mistwraiths roaming the Empire wouldve been burned alive. 

The remaining Mistwraiths in the caverns wouldve had their spikes restored and its not like the Kandra would just want to pull out their spikes again to be Mistwraiths... so the Mistwraiths pretty much disappeared entirely after the remaking of the world.

[+Invocation]

I think the kandra have them. They seem to imply that when they said they would have made more of themselves if they had the spikes to do so. 

[HavingTheHasHoidAPurpose?]

13 hours ago, Invocation said:

I think the kandra have them. They seem to imply that when they said they would have made more of themselves if they had the spikes to do so. 

So Im unclear on this. When the first and second generation died, were their spikes made unusable by the process? or were they used to make a new generation?

otherwise, they have extra spikes which are losing potency, but no hosts

[Quantus]

14 hours ago, Eternal Khol said:

 i think this is the most likely answer

the Kandra population was never actually that large. Even mistwraiths were considered myth/folktale to most of the general populace(iirc?)

Then the world literally began burning before sazed took the power. He notes how trees started to just catch fire. Any Mistwraiths roaming the Empire wouldve been burned alive. 

The remaining Mistwraiths in the caverns wouldve had their spikes restored and its not like the Kandra would just want to pull out their spikes again to be Mistwraiths... so the Mistwraiths pretty much disappeared entirely after the remaking of the world.

He took the time and effort to "fix" the Koloss so they would be a self-sustaining race, I dont think he'd entirely abandon the Kandra wholesale, and the Mistwraiths are critical to their future.  Other random options are that they could be on other continents, or even a settlement in the Cognitive Realm. 

I suspect the Kandra have "domesticated" the bulk of them, preserving them in some sort of ranches.  

[lukaash]

An interesting point to this is that mishwraiths were once feruchemist. If Harmony made them back into humans, there would be a group of extremely powerful full feruchemists. This would obviously cause problems in the world as generally the world has gotten weaker (power wise). I think that they are just going to be dead. They don't really have sentience, and Sazed does want to use hemalurgy. 

[+Invocation]

2 hours ago, HavingTheHasHoidAPurpose? said:

So Im unclear on this. When the first and second generation died, were their spikes made unusable by the process? or were they used to make a new generation?

otherwise, they have extra spikes which are losing potency, but no hosts

Well...

Quote

BlackYeti

Kandra, you're not getting any more of those. But they can die, so what's stopping them from creating new kandra out of the mistwraith just by recycling the Blessings?

Brandon Sanderson

That is mostly just cultural.

*paraphrased* In The Bands of Mourning, you might expect to see kandra using other kandra's spikes.

Shadows of Self Edinburgh UK signing (Oct. 21, 2015)

Not sure if this is talking about TenSoon donating a spike to ReLuur to try to restore his memory or if it's a hint that the Firsts and Seconds had their spikes recycled some.

[Cocoa]

6 hours ago, lukaash said:

An interesting point to this is that mishwraiths were once feruchemist. If Harmony made them back into humans, there would be a group of extremely powerful full feruchemists. This would obviously cause problems in the world as generally the world has gotten weaker (power wise).

Yup, covered that in the original post. If they were all feruchemists (as we would expect), it makes sense that Harmony would relocate them elsewhere (quite possibly to another continent altogether) in an attempt to prevent a power imbalance between neighbors.

5 hours ago, Invocation said:

Not sure if this is talking about TenSoon donating a spike to ReLuur to try to restore his memory or if it's a hint that the Firsts and Seconds had their spikes recycled some.

I suspect it is just a reference to the bit where TenSoon tried donating a spike to ReLuur. Though, since he says it's mostly just cultural, I doubt there's anything preventing a 'newborn' kandra from using hand-me-down spikes, it's just that once the consciousness forms it becomes dependent on having the original two spikes. With that in mind, I wonder if (somewhat ironically, since they're scavengers that have no qualms about consuming the corpses of other sapient species) we're looking at the kandra equivalent of a cannibalism taboo if the spikes aren't being recycled.

[+Invocation]

1 hour ago, Cocoa said:

With that in mind, I wonder if (somewhat ironically, since they're scavengers that have no qualms about consuming the corpses of other sapient species) we're looking at the kandra equivalent of a cannibalism taboo if the spikes aren't being recycled.

I'm not sure if it would translate as directly to a cannibalism taboo, unlike killing a kandra and using their spikes directly a la OreSeur and TenSoon, but it would probably be the equivalent of mistreating the body instead of doing a proper funeral/burial/cremation.

[Dancer]

Quote

 

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Eighty - Part Two

Sazed Sees Mistwraiths

I worry that I didn't get to show mistwraiths very much in this book. It's not that big of an issue—they're only a minor world feature, and are only tangentially important. Still, they're a part of the kandra past and culture, and I want readers to understand what they are and what they have to do with the kandra life cycle.

Remember, all of the kandra save for the First Generation were born first as mistwraiths. That race of creatures breeds true, and has only a fifty-year lifespan. They die off, but birth new members. Taking one of those new members and adding spikes to them, however, awakens them and brings them sentience. They're part human, just like the koloss who remember having once been human.

From this we can concur that even if Harmony were to turn all the Mistwraiths backs to human they would not necessarily be Feruchemists. After all only the first generation were Feruchemists and the rest are a thousand years removed from those genes.  

Edited February 10, 2022 by Dancer

[+Oltux72]

2 hours ago, Dancer said:

From this we can concur that even if Harmony were to turn all the Mistwraiths backs to human they would not necessarily be Feruchemists. After all only the first generation were Feruchemists and the rest are a thousand years removed from those genes.  

Why? They descend from feruchemists and had no mundane population to breed into them.

[Dancer]

33 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

Why? They descend from feruchemists and had no mundane population to breed into them.

they also had a thousand years of no Human (and so no Feruchemist) DNA and sDNA. When the Lord Ruler made Mistwraiths he created them with a spiritual and cognitive block to stop them from ever using the Metallic arts (namely Feruchemy). After a thousand years of breading with this block if turned back to human there is no guaranty that they would now be able to use the metallic arts. This is all moot though because if Harmony wanted them to be Feruchemists they will be Feruchemists.

[+robardin]

Only the First Generation were originally human Feruchemists - mistwraiths are a separate species that "breed  true".

I have speculated elsewhere that one of my "personal crackpot theories" is that the sDNA of the First Generation are or were involved in creating the "Excisors" technology for medallions, or in enabling Kelsier The Sovereign to do Feruchemy (if that was not an illusion, as Kell is perfectly capable of doing and loves to do).

After all, when Kelsier see dying koloss appearing in the CR in Mistborn: Secret History, they are human again (like the obligator who told him about the spikes). So it would stand to reason that another "modified" human might appear in the CR as human once again, with their original attributes like Feruchemy still intact.

The rebuttal to that is that the power of Preservation is capable of twiddling sDNA as well - Rashek used it to "build himself" as a super powerful Mistborn as well as Feruchemist, and Sazed upgraded Spook to "late FE power level" Mistborn without having to form diluted lerasium for him, so perhaps the process of making the other living Feruchemists into mistwraiths would allow for excising that power from their sDNA, even if they were "cognitively" still human.