Nightmares and Midnight?

[AltonicKeys he/him]

I've noticed there's some correlation between the Shroud, nightmares, and Midnight essence. They're that inky black that doesn't quite reflect light, they have that smoky residue, and they're really weird. Could the Shroud be made out of Midnight Essence, or are they both made out of the same thing? 
The Shroud and the nightmares are basically made out of souls without the soul part. Soul waste. Midnight aether from Tress might have something to do with spiritual stuff 

(Also Aether of Night probably can't be counted here but I want to note that night aether is described with the same black smoke stuff)

[Authorspren]

Another point worth mentioning is that Nightblood leaks black smoke when used. Not only is this black smoke described as "inky", it is also apparently very similar to the Shroud.

Maybe it's kind of like the color red. Red is corrupted Investiture; could black be Investiture that has somehow decayed? That could also explain why Ruin's Investiture is black, since Ruin's Intent is decay.

[alder24]

8 hours ago, AltonicKeys said:

I've noticed there's some correlation between the Shroud, nightmares, and Midnight essence. They're that inky black that doesn't quite reflect light, they have that smoky residue, and they're really weird. Could the Shroud be made out of Midnight Essence, or are they both made out of the same thing? 
The Shroud and the nightmares are basically made out of souls without the soul part. Soul waste. Midnight aether from Tress might have something to do with spiritual stuff 

(Also Aether of Night probably can't be counted here but I want to note that night aether is described with the same black smoke stuff)

No. They look similar, yes, but the Shroud is not a Midnight Essence. The Shroud is raw investiture striped off its identity - it's more like the dark smoke that leaks from Nightblood, as both him and the Father Machine are Awakened objects feeding on investiture, and the Shroud is a leftover from the souls the machine fed on, just like the dark smoke leaking from Nightblood. But the Shroud is also made out of Cognitive Shadows.

Spoiler

Comatose

Kind of a similar question about the Midnight Essence, now that we have seen that crop up in Tress as well as in Stormlight Archive. Is something similar happening with the Midnight Essence? We have also the nightmares, in Yumi, that appear similar, they're also mimicking things.

Brandon Sanderson

So, there's a couple of things getting interwoven here. The actual idea of Midnight Essence is a concept like Lightweaving that predates the Shattering of Adonalsium, that various magic systems are basically "borrowing" a law of the cosmere and creating a parallel effect from the same basis, if that makes any sense.

Yumi is a little distinct from that. It's feeling similar; I would not call it true Midnight Essence. It's an awful lot more like a Lightweaving that has--because Lightweavings can have mass to them, because investiture can have mass to it--so you're looking a little bit more like... imagine a bunch of Stormlight becoming tangible, you can touch it, because of a powerful Lightweaving or something like that. Of course, these things all bleed together because I'm using the same fundamental principles to make them. But, for me, Midnight Essence has this personality that comes prefixed. What the Midnight Mother is making, what you're seeing in the Midnight Sea and things like this, you're gonna get some similar personalities to these things, and not necessarily the same with the nightmares.

Comatose

So it's more of a autonomous-- a Lightweaving that's become autonomous and has kind of broken down a bit?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah...  the problem is it's also got the Cognitive Shadow, right? It's a really invested Cognitive Shadow that is borrowing this Investiture to interact with the world. Because these are their shadows; these are their Cognitive Shadows, all of these people's Cognitive Shadows. But the power is not themselves. Remember, a Cognitive Shadow is a little bit like a fossil, like Vasher describes it. You've got this pattern there, and then the power kind of makes it manifest and be able to interact, and things like that. And, when that personality asserts itself with that power in the right place, you end up with a person that is the shadow running it. But at the same time, you've got this mass of power and energy that the machine is kind of controlling, which pulls back and overrides the personality sometimes. You've got a very weird set of circumstances going on here.

But it was very fun to figure out all the backstory and the behind on it, and get it all working. This one was a little complex, to get these things all working behind the scenes. I like how they turned out. Yumi, if you dig into it, it has both pluses and minuses. The minuses is - from the beta readers and the alpha readers - the ending for non-arcanists was really overwhelming, which is why we have those Hoid scenes where he's like, "Okay, let me explain." It seems pretty obvious, I would expect that this is, like, "Alright, Brandon needs to do better explanations, Hoid's just gonna do it." But, because of all the work I did behind the scenes on Yumi, Yumi matches kind of cosmerological magic system stuff in ways that a lot of the side projects that I do just don't. Yumi is very deeply intertwined and following all of these processes in a way that works really well for me. But it also gets you into where you start to need a master's degree in the cosmere to figure it all out, which is why to make it easier, we have Hoid just spell it out for people. It is a little clunky; I prefer the clunkiness to the previous version where you needed a master's degree in the cosmere to understand even what was going on.

Shardcast Interview (July 30, 2023)

 

Spoiler

Argent

Staying with Yumi, since we're asking the big questions here. I want to talk about the big machine, the father machine.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Argent

There are some really interesting what feel like intentional parallels between it and Nightblood.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Argent

There's smoke involved, there's eating of souls, there's a whole bunch of things. So what I do want to ask is: one, was the father machine Awakened using Breaths, using Nalthian Awakening? Or are you using Awakening as Lightweaving or Bondsmithing which is an overarching system in the Cosmere?

Brandon Sanderson

It's the second. This wouldn't exist in the pre-space-age as much; by space age there's a certain terminology that is going between... basically it's starting with the arcanists and moving to the general population. What certain themes in the Cosmere magics mean. And so when Hoid says "this is an Awakened machine" his audience understands what that means. It does not necessarily mean Breaths Awaken, but Breaths are one of the main ways that people see things be Awakened. You should be noticing those parallels, but that's a term that in the Cosmere is becoming genericized to mean un-living object being given some measure of sentience and even sapience by application of Investiture, Commands, and these sorts of things. By this point they've all interacted with various Awakened machines of sorts in the future Cosmere. They know what this means. They've talked to an Awakened computer.

Argent

Interesting! Very interesting! That's what I was hoping you would answer. Because Awakening is such a cool term for Awakening an object, right!

One notable difference between the father machine and Nightblood other than them using different magic systems to be Awakened is that the Machine was able to somehow draw people's souls at a distance, which seems EXTREMELY broken to me.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. I had to let... This is going to be a pretty special circumstance for this book. But yes. It is pretty broken. You wouldn't want this to be... this could be very dangerous in the wrong hands. Don't expect this to be very commonly used in the Cosmere.

Argent

Was that a side effect of the magic system that was used to Awaken the machine, or was there something else going on?

Brandon Sanderson

This is a side effect of what Virtuosity did and the bit of Virtuosity in all the people allowing the Machine to have enough of a plausible Connection to them to draw upon them.

Argent

Ok. Interesting. I will think about this while I pass the ball back to Matt.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. This is me pushing just a little bit hard on the boundaries of what is possible. It is possible, but it it is pushing further than I normally would on the bounds of what that can do.

Shardcast Interview (July 30, 2023)

 

8 hours ago, Authorspren said:

Maybe it's kind of like the color red. Red is corrupted Investiture; could black be Investiture that has somehow decayed? That could also explain why Ruin's Investiture is black, since Ruin's Intent is decay.

Maybe, but not like that. Nightblood contains Ruin's investiture and the dark smoke leaking from Nightblood is corrupted investiture - not red. Nightblood most likely corrupts and changes consumed investiture into Ruin's investiture, thus the smoke is black. But Ruin's investiture isn't "decayed" investiture just because Ruin is Ruin, it's normal investiture keyed to Ruin and that's it. It's black for the same reason Preservation's investiture is white, Cultivation's green or Honor's blue, but it's not "decayed" investiture. 

Spoiler

Walin

Does Nightblood contain any of Ruin's Investiture? Like, not atium, but...

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, technically; and I'm not wiggling around that, because technically, location in the Cosmere and who belongs to what gets really weird, right? Because Ruin's Investiture is everywhere--but I'm not talking that way. I'm talking the way you actually mean it. 

Legion Release Party (Sept. 19, 2018)

 

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

Anyway, Nightblood is named for the smoke he leaks, and he originally had a different name when he was created. Vasher himself dubbed the sword Nightblood after he had used it to kill the woman he loved. The blackness that leaks out is actually corrupted and consumed Breaths, the ones that Nightblood leeches off anyone who draws him.

Warbreaker Annotations (April 25, 2011)

 

[AltonicKeys he/him]

aw man I gotta read more wobs. But what I'm getting is that the shroud is like a bunch of cognitive shadows melted together. Do we know what the midnight essence actually is?

[alder24]

26 minutes ago, AltonicKeys said:

aw man I gotta read more wobs. But what I'm getting is that the shroud is like a bunch of cognitive shadows melted together. Do we know what the midnight essence actually is?

Not Cognitive Shadows. It's investiture, and involves some kind of corruption of it. It has some kind of mind and can be attached to a greater entity, like Midnight Aether or Re-Shephir, but also can be extracted and used independently. You can control it via Luhel Bond which is a temporary bond involving trade - they get something they want, you get to control them in return. Midnight Essence takes the form of living creatures, generally imitating what's near them. Here, the coppermind page about it: Midnight Essence

While Brandon said that the Shroud is not a true Midnight Essence, the similarities are clearly intentional and that's because the Midnight Essence is a broader Cosmere term, just like Lightweaving - the nature of Cosmere interpreted what the Father Machine did as something close to a Midnight Essence. In this case the difference seems to be that in Midnight Essence the personalities of all individual creations are very similar to each other, while in the Shroud the personalities are all unique, because they are Cognitive Shadows (per 1st WoB in my previous post). So I think that the Shroud is not a true Midnight Essence but it's kind of borrowing from it and it's based on the same rules with the exception being the Cognitive side of it. It's hard to say as we don't have a clear definition of what the Midnight Essence is.

Spoiler

Red the Windrunner (paraphrased)

We have now seen Midnight Essence on Lumar and as part of the Unmade on Roshar, should we assume that all the other Unmade have connections to Odium’s other conquests like maybe Sja-anat and Ambition?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Midnight Essence is more like Lightweaving in that multiple magic systems will reach the same conclusion. When something is done to the magic to corrupt it, it becomes like Midnight Essence. So while there are similarities between the two and they work the same they may not have the same point of origin.

Red the Windrunner (paraphrased)

So there is no meaningful connection between Sja-anat and Ambition?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

You weren’t going to let me off the hook. You are theorizing in a very interesting direction. RAFO!

Tampa Bay Comic Convention 2023 (July 28, 2023)

 

Spoiler

asmodeus

The nightmares seem a lot like Midnight Essence, and there's a lot of focus on art and transformation in both those magics. Is it relevant that the colors of the hion are reminiscent of the colors of Lightweavers and Elsecallers (the orders with Transformation)?

Brandon Sanderson

That was not done intentionally. The fact that they act like Midnight Essence was done intentionally. You will see me playing with similar things just like Lightweaving works on different planets with things like this. For instance, Midnight Essence... you're going to see pop up now and then. But I did not specifically choose the colors of the hion because they are similar to the Lightweaving orders of Knights Radiant.

Secret Project #3 Reveal and Livestream (March 22, 2022)