Forging a Deadeye

[Zkirby]

A question that's been rolling around in my head lately. Could a forger heal a deadeye by rewriting it's history? I know this would be a slim possibility, because investiture resistance, and an intimate knowledge of the entity you were wanting to rewrite. But, given proper information and investiture, could a forger heal a deadeye?

[alder24]

35 minutes ago, Zkirby said:

A question that's been rolling around in my head lately. Could a forger heal a deadeye by rewriting it's history? I know this would be a slim possibility, because investiture resistance, and an intimate knowledge of the entity you were wanting to rewrite. But, given proper information and investiture, could a forger heal a deadeye?

We don't have a direct WoB on this, but I would say it's probably possible - at least for a short while, not permanently of course. You might be able to rewrite Deadeye's past to make them not bonded when Recreance happened, thus surviving it. It's gonna require a lot of investiture because spren are super invested, but Forgery in general is quite good at overcoming resistance of invested souls - it is possible to change a personality of a spren with Forgery, so rewriting their past should be equally possible. It's even possible to Forge a Windrunner into a Lightweaver or some other Order. 

In terms of knowledge this would be hard to pull off - a Forger needs to know the past of their subject to create a believable Essence Mark. With Deadeye it would be very hard to know who they were before, with whom they were bonded and all those details of their past because they have been "dead" for 2,500 years, with barely anyone living now who knows them at all (as they all died as well). You would be basically writing the Essence Mark blindly, which probably is the reason why it wouldn't work. But in theory it should be possible.

Spoiler

DTF_20170515

Why refrigerate food when you can just stamp spoiled food so that it was stored properly before?

Aurora_Fatalis

You'll have to ask Brandon how that'd interact with gastric acid breaking down the stamp. Or how porous/loose material interacts with stamps in the first place.

Come to think of it... There's a WoB saying the Nightwatcher could change your species, but have a hard time making a spren bond to you. So... could the Nightwatcher turn you Scadrian and make you eligible for Allomantic powers? Or does the Nightwatcher's boons operate on soulstamp principles?

Hell, let's say you bought a vial of the wrong metal on your field trip to Sel. Could you pay a Forger to stamp the vial into being a vial of the right metal (it's believable that you would check before such an important trip) and then drink the metal contained in the vial to fuel your Allomancy?

Brandon Sanderson

All right, all right. Let's see... /u/Aurora_Fatalis, changing metals around with other forms of Investiture is generally going to work, according to how I view the magic right now. The power is there, you just need to align the matter the right way. So forging new metals: not too difficult. This is because Allomancy isn't actually using Investiture in the metals, but using it as a key to get power from somewhere else.

Forging a sword to be a Shardblade, however, would be very, very difficult for multiple reasons. The most obvious one is that the Investiture required would be enormous. A Shardblade is a highly-Invested object, with its own self-aware soul.

If you could overcome the initial resistance invested objects have to being influenced by other magics (something that Forgery is particularly good at doing anyway) you'd theoretically be able to change Shardblade/spren's personality like you could a person's.

Fooling the magic via Connection and Identity is not so hard, under the right circumstances, so making a Forger into an Elantrian (or an Allomancer) for a short time is plausible. Making yourself into a Radiant, however, would be more difficult--because the limitations placed on that magic have to do with persuading a sapient being you are worth the bond.

Aurora_Fatalis

How about regular food? If I stamp a pineapple pizza into a pepperoni pizza and eat it, what nutrients do I end up with?

Brandon Sanderson

The way I have it working now, I believe (though I'd have to do some double-checking, as it's been a while since I've been working on Sel) soulstamps are more fragile than things like Aons, and it would be very hard to eat something with one without breaking it. But assuming you could, you'd get nutrients from what it had become--but those would change back once the stamp broke or ran out.

It is possible to go so far down this rabbit hole, however, that the chemistry of Forging (like the physics of Allomancy) it just can't make sense any more. So be aware.

Oversleep

With things like Stamping metals for Allomancy, you have said that it'd be possible for short time, but then burning it would break the Seal and metal would revert back.

I guess it would be similar with food, right?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, that's the big problem with Forging. Getting the stamp to stay in place once you start to change the object that has been stamped.

General Reddit 2018 (Aug. 27, 2018)

 

Spoiler

Questioner

Could a Forger, like, reforge a Shardplate to look differently?

Brandon Sanderson

So here's the thing... Um, yes, *but*... Anything that is Invested is-- resists all of the forms of Investiture. And the level of Investiture in it determines how hard it is. Forging is one of these things that-- It's very hard to reforge things that are Invested. Not impossible though. So yes, *but*... Do you see what I'm saying? There's that-- there's a pretty significant "but" on that one.

Calamity release party (Feb. 16, 2016)

 

Spoiler

Questioner

Soul Forging. Emperor's Soul. If one created the stamp properly, could you, using it, say, Windrunner you stamp, rewrote past to be Lightweaver. Possible?

Brandon Sanderson

That is possible and a little easier than a lot of other things. It's gonna run into problems... in that the Oaths are gonna be hard to align.

Questioner

Probably require some very fine crafting on the stamp.

Brandon Sanderson

Very fine crafting on the stamp. And there are certain people that they're just gonna have a hard time fitting into certain Orders. This is a lot easier though than just taking a random person and making them into one, because you're gonna already have Investiture that they've got.

Questioner

And have the basis of the First Oath.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. So this is not as hard as it might at first sound. It's the sort of thing that people in the cosmere are looking at. Like, being able to transfer magics between-- and things like that is one of very much interest in the cosmere.

The Great American Read: Other Worlds with Brandon Sanderson (Oct. 25, 2018)

 

Edited September 5, 2024 by alder24

[Quantus he/him]

15 hours ago, alder24 said:

 

In terms of knowledge this would be hard to pull off - a Forger needs to know the past of their subject to create a believable Essence Mark. With Deadeye it would be very hard to know who they were before, with whom they were bonded and all those details of their past because they have been "dead" for 2,500 years, with barely anyone living now who knows them at all (as they all died as well). You would be basically writing the Essence Mark blindly, which probably is the reason why it wouldn't work. But in theory it should be possible.

Agreed.  There should be a few things available to help them with the stamp design though.  ES showed that objective testing is possible, at least enough to verify the design. It's still wandering in the dark for the most part.  But there are sources of information that could help. There were some surviving spren:  the young, the Highspren, the Godspren, and possibly some of the other Orderspren (we know all the Honorspren participated but I dont think we know for sure on the rest of the subraces).  The Heralds could be helpful if they happened to know that particular spren.  Shallan's vaguely supernatural Drawings might help (they've always seemed to be slightly different/better versions of people). Possibly that weird Void-lightweaving effect that Renarin hit Moash with in ROW, which seemed to be an alternate version Fortune effect.  

[+Lewis Nethur He/Him]

On 9/5/2024 at 4:40 PM, Zkirby said:

A question that's been rolling around in my head lately. Could a forger heal a deadeye by rewriting it's history? I know this would be a slim possibility, because investiture resistance, and an intimate knowledge of the entity you were wanting to rewrite. But, given proper information and investiture, could a forger heal a deadeye?

Honestly, the easiest solution here that I see wouldn't be re-Forging the deadeye spren's history so that it was never bonded and broken up with by it's Radiant, it would be forging a regular random person (or oneself) to possess the exact same qualities that attracted the spren to forge  (small f) it's initial protobond from its first relationship with a pre-Radiant. If you did that, then I would expect that only a relatively simple soulstamp would need to be placed on the spren to make it treat a bond to this new would-be Radiant as Spiritually equivalent to a bond from its first would-be Radiant.

Hopefully that makes sense; my intuition is just screaming at me that two small soulstamps, one on either side of the Radiant bond, is definitely going to be radically easier to make work than rewriting all of history on one side or the other with one extra-big-ass soulstamp. As a bonus, smaller and simpler soulstamps are typically more stable anyway, so this method should technically be both easier to actualize, more time and resource efficient, and last longer than a full one-sided re-Forging.

Edited September 7, 2024 by hwiles