"I write these words in steel"... what about rust?

[king of nowhere]

Central to the plot of mistborn: the well of ascension, Kwaan knew that Ruin could alter written messages unless they were on metals, so he etched his warning on a steel plate (hint: if you must pass critical information, put it at the beginning of your message, with clear indication of its importance. Not in the end, after a needlessly lenghty, off-putting wall of seemingly mundane text).

The slab was then moved to the conventical of Seran, where it remained for 1000 years before Sazed found it...

Steel is an amazing material. We don't appreciate it enough, because it can be made with very common ingredients, but it's got a wonderful mix of mechanical properties that make it good at almost everything. It's only got one weakness: corrosion.

I have a very hard time accepting that the slab of steel could have preserved fine etchings (such as those you could make by manually scratching a pointy, hard object on the surface) for a full millennia. Even if it was kept in a cool, dry (maybe) environment all that time.

The closest parallel I can think of is ancient armor; we have some well-kept specimen, but to the best of my knowledge they still did form a patina of black oxide on the surface. patina that was kept scrubbed clean over time. however, the scrubbing would destroy the fine etchings and make kwaan's slab unreadable. I am not aware of any artifact from 1000 years ago that was preserved well enough to still be readable.

please, prove me wrong. I'd rather not have found a plot hole.

P.S. Using copper would have been better. It's a lot more corrosion-resistant, and it's also softer, so you could leave deeper indentations that would preserve better. I'd have zero problems believing that a copper plate could have preserved the message for 1000 years. Gold could have been even better, no corrosion, except that someone could have stolen the plate and melted it for a quick profit.

[alder24]

5 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

please, prove me wrong. I'd rather not have found a plot hole.

Good question and Brandon thought about it when writing Mistborn - unfortunately he forgot what was his solution, but they probably plated those steel plates in something that doesn't rust.

Spoiler

Questioner

All of these steel plates in the caverns, before chromium was well known, how did they not get rusted?

Brandon Sanderson

I actually thought about this. I kind of imagine some of them rusted, but at the same time I've read about-- What was my answer to this? I have an answer. I can't remember what my answer is, so I'm going to RAFO that. Send it to me and I'll try to look it up. I had an answer to this. They were... using some sort of thing to keep it from rusting.

Questioner

So there were people in the Steel Ministry keeping it clean?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't think that was my answer. I thought that I had them plating it somehow, but I'm not sure. I mean we're talking ten years ago now when I wrote this. I think I had them plating it somehow, because I needed them to last longer. You can just write that one as a RAFO, but it's a RAFO that Brandon can't remember. It happens sometimes. It's one of those things Peter asked me when we were working on the books and I'm like, "Oh, we'd better have an answer for this," but now I don't remember what it is.

Orem signing (March 10, 2018)

 

[+Lewis Nethur He/Him]

On 10/22/2024 at 9:32 AM, king of nowhere said:

Central to the plot of mistborn: the well of ascension, Kwaan knew that Ruin could alter written messages unless they were on metals, so he etched his warning on a steel plate (hint: if you must pass critical information, put it at the beginning of your message, with clear indication of its importance. Not in the end, after a needlessly lenghty, off-putting wall of seemingly mundane text).

The slab was then moved to the conventical of Seran, where it remained for 1000 years before Sazed found it...

Steel is an amazing material. We don't appreciate it enough, because it can be made with very common ingredients, but it's got a wonderful mix of mechanical properties that make it good at almost everything. It's only got one weakness: corrosion.

I have a very hard time accepting that the slab of steel could have preserved fine etchings (such as those you could make by manually scratching a pointy, hard object on the surface) for a full millennia. Even if it was kept in a cool, dry (maybe) environment all that time.

The closest parallel I can think of is ancient armor; we have some well-kept specimen, but to the best of my knowledge they still did form a patina of black oxide on the surface. patina that was kept scrubbed clean over time. however, the scrubbing would destroy the fine etchings and make kwaan's slab unreadable. I am not aware of any artifact from 1000 years ago that was preserved well enough to still be readable.

please, prove me wrong. I'd rather not have found a plot hole.

P.S. Using copper would have been better. It's a lot more corrosion-resistant, and it's also softer, so you could leave deeper indentations that would preserve better. I'd have zero problems believing that a copper plate could have preserved the message for 1000 years. Gold could have been even better, no corrosion, except that someone could have stolen the plate and melted it for a quick profit.

It's been a long while since I thought about that early section. Would you accept that it may be possible someone was maintaining it? Like...an Inqisitor just reapplying it with a low-tech clear coat every few years? It would start to peel eventually, but it would just need to be gently sanded by hand (very little damage to the underlying metal) and reapplied with a thin layer of sealant to restore. If not, then we may need a archeologist to address this. 

Edited October 23, 2024 by hwiles

[Duxredux he/him]

One thing to remember is that despite being an ancient era, they were close to steam power in the days of Kwaan. I could believe that Scadrial may have developed metallurgical technology faster than IRL if Feruchemists were seeking metals that could expand their powers and could retain information better through the ages. No idea what insights they could gain from Realmatic Theory, but they also knew about it.

Pure speculation here, but we know that the Terris Prophecies were a thing and that they predicted perfectly a tipping point well over a millenia in the future. This may indicate that they had access to Chromium, the Feruchemical metal for Fortune, and Chromium is the major additive for stainless steel. Tapping Fortune allows for serendipitous occurrences, so perhaps certain things aligned for the necessary techniques to preserve Kwaan's plate to be invented at an earlier time frame than expected. 

Otherwise the technologically available preservation options include a maintenance routine by applying oil to the steel to prevent atmospheric contact and keeping the plate in an underground environment (which they did). Galvanization came later.

There is also a very simple solution: it's not the original plate or the original etchings. Rashek himself or a random ministry scribe could have deepened the original etching, or simply copied it to a new plate when the old one was getting hard to read. It was written in an old Terris dialect, it's not like the ministry workers could read the inscription anyway. Rashek oversaw the preservation of the information, which didn't necessarily mean the original plate or his uncle's handwriting.

Edited October 25, 2024 by Duxredux

[Light In the Darkness]

I think another piece of this might be that the engravings are deeper than you might think; the plate seems rather large, and Sazed has to take multiple rubbings to get all of it. The Prophecy is long, but not that long. If the plate were a bit thinner and a chisel was used instead of just an etching tool, the marks could have been deep enough to last for a substantial amount of time even without preservation techniques. Which, with that, it is very possible that Rashek learned how to make stainless steel from his Ascension, and decided to re-cast and preserve the plate in the more ageable material, or did something to hand-wave the problem away before running out of power, which is odd since he shouldn't have been able to change the steel, but possible - as far as I know, only Ruin is confirmed to be unable to change metal; somehow Rashek managed to make enough spikes for all his Terris companions to make them kandra, though I don't think there were many normal people for him to kill for it, and I don't know where he got the metal for it either.