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We've seen with Bleeder and with Set members that Trellium can be used to Hemalurgically grant someone Metalborn powers, but we've also seen that it can be used to create Hemalurgic constructs- the Chimera- which is normally only doable with human attributes.

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The Hero of Ages Annotations (Nov. 17, 2009)

Brandon Sanderson

The Mechanism of Hemalurgy

The Blessings and the workings of Hemalurgy gave me some trouble as I designed the second and third books of this series. On one hand, I liked the way Hemalurgy worked by stealing powers from Allomancers or Feruchemists and giving them to other people. However, if I was going to limit myself to sixteen metals and be able to steal both Allomancy and Feruchemy, that meant I needed a mechanism to determine which power got stolen. If, for instance, you drove a pewter spike into a person who was both an Allomancer and a Feruchemist, then how would that spike know which power to suck out and grant to the one who would gain it?

As I was toying with how this would work, I realized that I needed to work the kandra and the koloss into this as well. Only, it was ridiculous to assume that the Lord Ruler would kill Allomancers to make koloss. There weren't enough Allomancers, for one thing—plus it would be foolish to lose the power of an Allomancer to gain an inferior tool in a koloss.

So that meant koloss had to be made out of regular people, not Allomancers or Feruchemists. Suddenly I had another set of abilities that Hemalurgy had to be able to steal—the basic pieces of Preservation inside the souls of all men.

Hence the decision that where the spike was placed in the receiver, and how it was used to kill a person, influenced how the power was shaped. Now a pewter spike could steal any of a number of powers, based on how it was used. And regular people could be used instead of Allomancers—however, when that happened, the receiver was twisted much more than if an Allomantically charged spike or a Feruchemically charged spike was used.

My rationale for this is that if the spike is pulling out the pure power of Preservation—part of the power of all creation—and twisting it, it would change the body of the recipient greatly. Twisting them through use of the twisted power.

I wonder then, if the Bindpoint placement is even more important than I had previously imagined.

Could you perhaps keep someone a human while using Hemalurgy to staple on extra human attributes, since it seems that you can do the opposite- staple the portion of a Spiritweb meant to grant powers to someone else onto a human and turn them into a Hemalurgic construct?

  • 3 weeks later...
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Argenti said:

While an interesting idea, Chimera were human pre-spiking.

I think that @alder24 means that attributes were spiked out of animals and the Hemalurgically charged Trellium spikes were then implanted into humans to create Chimera. It's an interesting idea and does have some merit to it, but it would also be the first example we would have seen canonically, so I'd wait for more confirmation before settling on it.

Edited by Trusk'our
Posted
Just now, Trusk'our said:

I think that @alder24 means that attributes were spiked out of animals and the Hemalurgically charged Trellium spikes were implanted into humans to create Chimera. It's an interesting idea and does have some merit to it, but it would also be the first example we would have seen canonically yet, so I'd wait a bit before settling on it.

Yeah that makes more sense. We would really need a WoB to confirm 

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