Awakening Soulcast Bodies?

[Trusk'our he/him]

If you were to Soulcast a statue of a human into flesh and then Awaken that flesh, would it work just as well as Awakening a corpse, or since it was never alive, would it be harder? Is it only the material and shape of the Awakened object that matter, or does it actually have to have been alive at some point?

Edited July 2, 2022 by Trusk'our

[Dunkum he/him]

we have a WoB about the reverse, so history matters.  my guess is it probably wouldn't be a lifeless, but I admit i'm not sure.  i'm also now curious what would happen if it was a person who was soulcast to stone then soulcast back to flesh

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Questioner

So the lighteyes that get Soulcast into stone, can they be Awakened?

Brandon Sanderson

*pause* So… Yes, but their soul is gone. When they get Soulcast into stone it is only the corpse, so yes they could.

Questioner

Would it be a lifeless or a-- Would it be like Awakening something inorganic or would them once being alive help?

Brandon Sanderson

The fact that they were once alive will help. There's a Spiritual Connection that still exists on the Spiritual Realm and that is going to help. But you're not going to get the person back. The fact that it is the exact form of a person is going to be really helpful. It would be a lot easier to Awaken that than it would be to Awaken other stone.

 

[Arsteel]

Well, they would'nt have any organs (though I don't know if this is relavent for lifeless). Even if it isn't, I think it wouldn't become a lifeless but something less instead, because of how a lifeless' experiences before they died affect their abilities. I.e. Jewel's lifeless (made from Arsteel) is a relatively skilled swordsfighter.

Possibly an awakened soulcast corpse simply wouldn't understand how to perform basic actions such as walking, because unlike a lifeless its body has no muscle memory (or other Connection to these basic actions) left over from life.

@Dunkum, I think soulcasting to stone and back to flesh would work, at the very least, better than a corpse made from stone that was always stone. Maybe the length of time they spent as stone matters, as the corpse might get used to being stone and slowly forget its previous existence. 

This got really long.

[Honorless he/him]

A statue would have the general shape but not the underlying skeletal and muscular structure that Kalad's Phantoms or corpses Soulcast to stone would have. Investiture can still make them move just fine. We've seen people Awaken things that then just proceeded to mimic human motion without human structure, of course those things were stuff like straw or cloth, but stone would move just fine too, it would just need a few seams, that's how the T'Telir statues moved:

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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)

It being in a human shape would make it easier to Awaken, but less so than a Soulcast corpse since it would have no memory of being alive. So, it would take more Breaths, no idea how much though

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Questioner

So the lighteyes that get Soulcast into stone, can they be Awakened?

Brandon Sanderson

*pause* So… Yes, but their soul is gone. When they get Soulcast into stone it is only the corpse, so yes they could.

Questioner

Would it be a lifeless or a-- Would it be like Awakening something inorganic or would them once being alive help?

Brandon Sanderson

The fact that they were once alive will help. There's a Spiritual Connection that still exists on the Spiritual Realm and that is going to help. But you're not going to get the person back. The fact that it is the exact form of a person is going to be really helpful. It would be a lot easier to Awaken that than it would be to Awaken other stone.

 

[Arsteel]

A very good point.

I believe it is unusual for Investiture alone to give objects a life of their own, as happens in awakening. The other magic systems only give the user limited control over the movement of some objects, compared to Awakening, which gives an objective and the ability to act and react on its own according to the objective.

Please tell me if I'm wrong, as this is just a guess, but is Investiture alone (being pure energy) normally able to do things like this? Yes, the breath is directed by the command, but normally that would just make the object act in a partcular way when commanded, instead of continuing to act/react afterwards.

If Investiture isn't, then does Breath -as opposed to other forms of Investiture- contain Identity or Connection of its own? After all, it is harvested from people who it leaves incomplete afterwards, as if they were missing part of themselves. Or I'm just reading too much into this.

 

 

[Honorless he/him]

3 hours ago, Arsteel said:

A very good point.

I believe it is unusual for Investiture alone to give objects a life of their own, as happens in awakening. The other magic systems only give the user limited control over the movement of some objects, compared to Awakening, which gives an objective and the ability to act and react on its own according to the objective.

Please tell me if I'm wrong, as this is just a guess, but is Investiture alone (being pure energy) normally able to do things like this? Yes, the breath is directed by the command, but normally that would just make the object act in a partcular way when commanded, instead of continuing to act/react afterwards.

If Investiture isn't, then does Breath -as opposed to other forms of Investiture- contain Identity or Connection of its own? After all, it is harvested from people who it leaves incomplete afterwards, as if they were missing part of themselves. Or I'm just reading too much into this.

I think it has more to do with the Spiritual Realm than Breaths. It is timeless and remembers what things used to be. Even in the Cognitive Realm, objects remember who they are / were.

[Arsteel]

3 hours ago, Honorless said:

I think it has more to do with the Spiritual Realm than Breaths. It is timeless and remembers what things used to be. Even in the Cognitive Realm, objects remember who they are / were.

 Exactly, this is what i meant earlier with the corpses -> stone statue -> corpse -> lifeless compared to stone staues -> corpse -> lifeless. But how do objects which were always inanimate (e.g. the doll Vasher makes at the start of Warbreaker) know how to act and move? They wouldn't have any Connections in the other realms if they'd never lived.

[Dunkum he/him]

12 minutes ago, Arsteel said:

 Exactly, this is what i meant earlier with the corpses -> stone statue -> corpse -> lifeless compared to stone staues -> corpse -> lifeless. But how do objects which were always inanimate (e.g. the doll Vasher makes at the start of Warbreaker) know how to act and move? They wouldn't have any Connections in the other realms if they'd never lived.

the breath does however. also, theres a WoB to the effect that any large amount of investiture left alone for long enough would eventually develop sentience, so investiture itself does have some tendency in that direction

[Arsteel]

1 hour ago, Dunkum said:

the breath does however. also, theres a WoB to the effect that any large amount of investiture left alone for long enough would eventually develop sentience, so investiture itself does have some tendency in that direction

Ah ok, thank you for explaining this. I find it very interesting how pure, unfocused energy without direction or a pattern develops sentience.

8 hours ago, Arsteel said:

If Investiture isn't, then does Breath -as opposed to other forms of Investiture- contain Identity or Connection of its own? 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Dunkum said:

the breath does

Exactly this is what i meant.