silver and aluminium against the nightmares

[king of nowhere]

we know silver works against the cognitive shadows on threnody. silver generally has good properties against a lot of invested entities.

would silver have worked against nightmares? there are strong similarities between the shades on threnody and the nightmares of komashi

 

we don't know what aluminium does to the shades of threnody, but it does affect investiture, blocking or negating it. would a wall of aluminium be able to keep the nightmares out?

 

mind you, it is fully possible that the nation of kilahito had no access to either. many rare metals are only available in a handful of places on the whole earth, and with kilahito only consisting of a few cities surrounded by the shroud, i'd bet they totally lacked a good half of the periodic table. silver is not too rare, but it is fully possible they just had no silver ores anywhere in their land and didn't even knew the element. there is no reference to silver anywhere in the novel, except in the end with silverware, and I doubt it means the eating implements were made of actual silver - it wasn't that posh of a restaurant anyway.

as for aluminium, while aluminium ores are ubiquitous in planetary crusts, kilahito derives all its advanced technology from hion. even though it mostly resembles 1950s, they could absolutely not have discovered aluminium smelting.

[Frustration he/him]

Well even if they had Silver, why would they decided to try that against nightmares that can move through walls? Especially when painting works.

 

Silver would probably be very effective against them.

Edited August 3, 2023 by Frustration

[king of nowhere]

11 hours ago, Frustration said:

Well even if they had Silver, why would they decided to try that against nightmares that can move through walls? Especially when painting works.

why would someone decide to use painting against a nightmare in the first place? I wonder how they discovered painting was effective; who was the first person who, confronted with a nightmare, decided to try and paint it. on the other hand, someone trashing and hitting a nightmare with the first object available, and that object being silver, is a lot more likely to happen. if there is silver around.

but that's a tangent.

[Frustration he/him]

6 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

why would someone decide to use painting against a nightmare in the first place? I wonder how they discovered painting was effective; who was the first person who, confronted with a nightmare, decided to try and paint it. on the other hand, someone trashing and hitting a nightmare with the first object available, and that object being silver, is a lot more likely to happen. if there is silver around.

but that's a tangent.

Actually considering that painting attracts the Nightmares, it's more likely that one of the victims was already painting when it happened.

Spoiler

Okay I looked through the arcanum, that WoB hasn't been transcribed yet.

 

[Elite01]

I think even if it would be hard to use a silver weapon against nightmares that could go through walls creating wards/barriers made of silver like they do on threnodite would be a good way to protect citizens till a painter could arrive. 

[Firesong she/her]

We know Silver disrupts basically all forms of Investiture, from a WoB and the fact that it can disrupt both Shades and Aethers. So, it 100% would have an effect on the Nightmares as well. 

[alder24]

This WoB \confirmed that the silver effect on investiture is universal, so it would work on Nightmares just like it works on Shades.

Spoiler

Argent

It seems there is a special interaction between silver and investiture, in at least certain places in the Cosmere. We've seen how silver interacts with aethers, and we've seen over on Threnody. So that makes silver the second really really special metal to interact with investiture. Is the plan now to have aluminum block investiture, and silver destroy investiture?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, that's the way I'm going with it. To make a distinction between them, that's where we're going.

Argent

But silver is still non-allomantic. No silvereyes.

Brandon Sanderson

No, non-allomantic, yup. No silvereyes. This is my nod towards silvereye-ness, and yeah, there we go.

Argent

So would that [aluminum?] be effective against spren, just like silver?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, you'll have to find out. RAFO!

Footnote: Argent tried.
Shardcast Interview (July 30, 2023)

 

[JohnnyKaizen he/him]

On 8/4/2023 at 6:59 AM, king of nowhere said:

why would someone decide to use painting against a nightmare in the first place? I wonder how they discovered painting was effective; who was the first person who, confronted with a nightmare, decided to try and paint it. on the other hand, someone trashing and hitting a nightmare with the first object available, and that object being silver, is a lot more likely to happen. if there is silver around.

but that's a tangent.

I would imagine that the history of the Yuki-Hijo is at play with the link of art and spirits. The people who survived would have talked about them for generation, if for no other reason that to speak of something better than the shroud. Humans do this. But it's been 1700 of their years, so clearly all of that history was lost to the populace. But it could be that some shadows of the past remain.

On 8/4/2023 at 1:35 PM, Frustration said:

Actually considering that painting attracts the Nightmares, it's more likely that one of the victims was already painting when it happened.

Also a totally valid point. Occam's razor should never be disregarded just because Brandon likes to be complicated.

[MasterK-Bob he/him]

Silver doesn't do anything with stormlight, and it's allomantically (and Feruchemically and Hemalurgically) inert but it's not like aluminum (which actually has an allomantic effect). It can be pushed and pulled on, just not burned by any mistings, or burned with effect by mistborn.

[alder24]

9 hours ago, MasterK-Bob said:

Silver doesn't do anything with stormlight

Do we know this? How many interactions between silver and Stormlight have we seen on pages? What about surges? We know silver has a potential to kill a spren:

Spoiler

Ace Heat

Would it be possible to use an aluminum spike to permanently kill a spren?

Brandon Sanderson

No, that's not gonna work. Silver, on the other hand, there's some possibility.

YouTube Spoiler Stream 4 (June 16, 2022)

Silver might work just on invested entities, Aethers are invested entities, spren too, CS as well, not on investiture in general. But we know too little now to know for sure.

[IlstrawberrySeed]

On 10/9/2023 at 7:33 PM, MasterK-Bob said:

Silver doesn't do anything with stormlight, and it's allomantically (and Feruchemically and Hemalurgically) inert but it's not like aluminum (which actually has an allomantic effect). It can be pushed and pulled on, just not burned by any mistings, or burned with effect by mistborn.

It's maybe inert - being that it doesn't make someone sick, but an incorrect alloy does. If one were to burn a non-viable metal, it *probably* makes someone sick, but it isn't garunteed. However, with it being the other half of electrum, I would expect it to count as an incorrect alloy unless it was also a viable metal in its own right.

[Aredor]

I'm thinking that the people on Komashi didn't use silver to destroy the nightmares and/or line their homes because of hion. They would probably know, after ~1700 years, that silver destroys the hion. When they discovered that a certain thing would destroy their energy, it would have made everyone wary of that thing. 

Hion is investiture. 

Silver destroys investiture

Therefore, silver destroys Hion.