External Gills he/him Posted June 10, 2023 Posted June 10, 2023 1) Dawnshards are huge amounts of Investiture. Warning, WoB about SP4 Spoiler Brandon Sanderson Let's talk about the Torment for a second. Hoid would not call what has happened to him a Torment. Hoid, by holding a Dawnshard, was made permanently unable to cause physical harm to other beings. Eating meat makes him nauseous (if he is somehow able to eat it, and a lot of the times he just can't). That is because of the nature of the Dawnshard that he held actively warping and changing his spirit. He would not name it this. Nomad has named what has happened to him, a Torment. This is not a term that you can universally apply as a magical aspect of something. This is Sigzil saying "this terrible thing happened to me". And indeed what is happening to Sigzil is on a level beyond what happened to Hoid. So therefore perhaps other arcanists would say, "Yes, these are an aspect of holding a Dawnshard and Torment is the right way", but that word is loaded. That word has meaning, and someone is naming it this. You are not gonna run into a large set of people- there are only four Dawnshards- and you're not gonna run into a large set of people that have held one, so there may be no consensus even in-world to what these are called, and if they are Torment or blessings or what they are. Holding a Dawnshard will warp your soul. It's so much Investiture, it is so powerful, that you cannot hold one even briefly without it having a permanent effect upon you. Secret Project #4 Reveal and Livestream (March 29, 2022) 2) When Investiture takes solid form, it's always a metal. This is not unique to Shardic Investiture: Spoiler Questioner So, kind of a support question... The nature of Investiture and metals, is it just solid Investiture that's metal or is all Investiture some kind of state of metal? Brandon Sanderson So this gets back into your idea of metal. Do they all represent metal? Well, I'm fascinated by states of matter, if you can't tell, and I'm fascinated by groupings on the periodic table in our world. I am fascinated by how certain things share... properties with one another but not other properties. When I was building the cosmere, I loved this idea of this pure Investiture, this solid state Investiture which looks like metal, but its not a metal that would be on our periodic table, and none of them are, but they share some properties with metals. You look at it and you're like "That's a metal!" But is it? Well it wouldn't go on the periodic table in our world. It's its own thing. So yes and no. Billy Todd Is that similar to the way that a Rosharan calls all birds "Chickens"? Brandon Sanderson No, the way that Rosharans call all birds "chickens" or all alcohols "wines" is actually me maybe feeling more clever than I am, putting in seeds from book one that-- This just happens in linguistics, where certain words sometimes narrow in definitions, other times they broaden in definition. Just how we call Googling something, searching for it. There are people who are joking that movies are just going to be called Disneys in the future. I love the linguistics of this, and I wanted to indicate that the word for "bird" just spread through Roshar as "chicken" because those were the birds that they knew about. And wine was a pretty good one. There aren't grapes on Roshar, right. They call them "wine"; none of it's wine. You wouldn't call any of it wine. Because they don't have grapes. But this is a word from a planet from when they used to have grapes, that they used for this thing, that eventually replaced the word and became the generic. You see it more often in our languages the other way, Peter can talk more about this. Words will become more and more narrow over time. JordanCon 2018 (April 21, 2018) 1+2 implies the existence of "Dawnshard metals" in the same way there are "God metals", right? Changium, etc.
alder24 Posted June 10, 2023 Posted June 10, 2023 36 minutes ago, External Gills said: 1) Dawnshards are huge amounts of Investiture. Warning, WoB about SP4 Reveal hidden contents Brandon Sanderson Let's talk about the Torment for a second. Hoid would not call what has happened to him a Torment. Hoid, by holding a Dawnshard, was made permanently unable to cause physical harm to other beings. Eating meat makes him nauseous (if he is somehow able to eat it, and a lot of the times he just can't). That is because of the nature of the Dawnshard that he held actively warping and changing his spirit. He would not name it this. Nomad has named what has happened to him, a Torment. This is not a term that you can universally apply as a magical aspect of something. This is Sigzil saying "this terrible thing happened to me". And indeed what is happening to Sigzil is on a level beyond what happened to Hoid. So therefore perhaps other arcanists would say, "Yes, these are an aspect of holding a Dawnshard and Torment is the right way", but that word is loaded. That word has meaning, and someone is naming it this. You are not gonna run into a large set of people- there are only four Dawnshards- and you're not gonna run into a large set of people that have held one, so there may be no consensus even in-world to what these are called, and if they are Torment or blessings or what they are. Holding a Dawnshard will warp your soul. It's so much Investiture, it is so powerful, that you cannot hold one even briefly without it having a permanent effect upon you. Secret Project #4 Reveal and Livestream (March 29, 2022) 2) When Investiture takes solid form, it's always a metal. This is not unique to Shardic Investiture: Reveal hidden contents Questioner So, kind of a support question... The nature of Investiture and metals, is it just solid Investiture that's metal or is all Investiture some kind of state of metal? Brandon Sanderson So this gets back into your idea of metal. Do they all represent metal? Well, I'm fascinated by states of matter, if you can't tell, and I'm fascinated by groupings on the periodic table in our world. I am fascinated by how certain things share... properties with one another but not other properties. When I was building the cosmere, I loved this idea of this pure Investiture, this solid state Investiture which looks like metal, but its not a metal that would be on our periodic table, and none of them are, but they share some properties with metals. You look at it and you're like "That's a metal!" But is it? Well it wouldn't go on the periodic table in our world. It's its own thing. So yes and no. Billy Todd Is that similar to the way that a Rosharan calls all birds "Chickens"? Brandon Sanderson No, the way that Rosharans call all birds "chickens" or all alcohols "wines" is actually me maybe feeling more clever than I am, putting in seeds from book one that-- This just happens in linguistics, where certain words sometimes narrow in definitions, other times they broaden in definition. Just how we call Googling something, searching for it. There are people who are joking that movies are just going to be called Disneys in the future. I love the linguistics of this, and I wanted to indicate that the word for "bird" just spread through Roshar as "chicken" because those were the birds that they knew about. And wine was a pretty good one. There aren't grapes on Roshar, right. They call them "wine"; none of it's wine. You wouldn't call any of it wine. Because they don't have grapes. But this is a word from a planet from when they used to have grapes, that they used for this thing, that eventually replaced the word and became the generic. You see it more often in our languages the other way, Peter can talk more about this. Words will become more and more narrow over time. JordanCon 2018 (April 21, 2018) 1+2 implies the existence of "Dawnshard metals" in the same way there are "God metals", right? Changium, etc. Kind of? Maybe? I don't know. Dawnshards are investiture. But they form a specific command and are merged with the soul of a person. Moreover, they exist in SR mainly or maybe only - not every person can see them, that's for me is an indication that they are mainly spiritual and only a person with strong connection to them can see them in SR. They don't seem to be that strongly invested to bleed into PR and manifest their own physical form of investiture like Shards do - we would see that. Is it even possible to separate part of a Dawnshard from your soul and push it into PR? I doubt it. If you were able to do it, would it remain connected to a Dawnshard, or would it lose that connection completely? Dawnshards are the most invested individuals besides Shards but is that enough to manifest a metal? 1
Underwater_Worldhopper he/him Posted June 10, 2023 Posted June 10, 2023 2 hours ago, External Gills said: 1) Dawnshards are huge amounts of Investiture. 2) When Investiture takes solid form, it's always a metal. This is not unique to Shardic Investiture: 1+2 implies the existence of "Dawnshard metals" in the same way there are "God metals", right? Changium, etc. 1 hour ago, alder24 said: Kind of? Maybe? I don't know. Dawnshards are investiture. But they form a specific command and are merged with the soul of a person. Moreover, they exist in SR mainly or maybe only - not every person can see them, that's for me is an indication that they are mainly spiritual and only a person with strong connection to them can see them in SR. They don't seem to be that strongly invested to bleed into PR and manifest their own physical form of investiture like Shards do - we would see that. Is it even possible to separate part of a Dawnshard from your soul and push it into PR? I doubt it. If you were able to do it, would it remain connected to a Dawnshard, or would it lose that connection completely? Dawnshards are the most invested individuals besides Shards but is that enough to manifest a metal? I don't think the nature of it matters. If part of the Dawnshard was pulled into the PR and condensed, it would probably become a God metal with its own properties. What Alder is asking is whether it's possible to actually achieve the necessary requirements to form a God metal from a Dawnshard, but that's tangential. If it was pulled into the Physical Realm, we can be decently sure it would become a God metal. Can we actually do it? We don't yet know enough to be able to say, which is what Alder is getting at. It's like how we know Harmonium has a Hemalurgic property. It's a God Metal, so it has to have one, regardless of the fact that it would literally be impossible to figure out what it does or actually put it to use. We don't know enough about the Dawnshards to say if it would be possible to do what is required to make it a God Metal, so I'm not even gonna touch any of that. I do have another avenue for us to explore, however. The Aethers are Investiture that is independent of Adonalsium. They, in physical form, do not become metals. The closest thing to them is Roseite, which forms as a crystal, but beyond that, they become vines, air, or even just heat and light. They make it hard to say for certain that Dawnshard Metals would even be metals. The Dawnshards are related to Adonalsium in some form though, so far as we can tell, so it's likely they would become metal. One thing I want to know is, Could a Mistborn burn the Aethers? They're physical Investiture and kind of act like God metals. The Investiture in God metals is the source of the power when burning them, so could you achieve the same effect with Aethers? 1
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