Before Koloss Recycled Spikes

[Trusk'our he/him]

TLR didn't expect the Koloss to continue existing after his fall, as they'd slaughter one another and had no new spikes provided for them.

Spoiler

https://coppermind.net/wiki/The_Hero_of_Ages/Epigraphs#Chapter_42

I think that the koloss were more intelligent than we wanted to give them credit for being. For instance, originally, they used only spikes the Lord Ruler gave them to make new members. He would provide the metal and the unfortunate skaa captives, and the koloss would create new "recruits."

At the Lord Ruler's death, then, the koloss should quickly have died out. This was how he had designed them. If they got free from his control, he expected them to kill themselves off and end their own rampage. However, they somehow made the deduction that spikes in the bodies of fallen koloss could be harvested, then reused.

They then no longer required a fresh supply of spikes. I often wonder what effect the constant reuse of spikes had on their population. A spike can only hold so much of a Hemalurgic charge, so they could not create spikes that granted infinite strength, no matter how many people those spikes killed and drew power from. However, did the repeated reuse of spikes perhaps bring more humanity to the koloss they made?

We know they eventually learned to recycle their old spikes, but what happened to the spikes before that practice?

Did Koloss-handling Obligators secretly harvest them and disguise the spikes as fresh ones (maybe some Koloss figured it out by watching)? Or, assuming they weren't obliterated by the Catacendre, are there potentially a bunch of iron chunks buried in Scadrial's crust with with a faint Hemalurgic charge?

Some Obligators or Koloss recycling spikes earlier on would help explain how Human had more intelligence before the fall of TLR (though he was more intelligent than average as a human to begin with). 

As a side note, I suppose the massive number of dead Koloss at the end of HoA would be more likely to shore up a bunch of Hemalurgic iron. So even if spikes were recycled earlier on, there is still precedence for leftover Hemalurgic Investiture somewhere on Scadrial. 

Edited December 25, 2024 by Trusk'our

[cometaryorbit]

I'd imagine they would recycle spikes when it was easy to do so, but not put themselves at risk to retrieve spikes.

Yeah, the battle at the end of HoA would have left something like a million spikes behind (300,000 koloss, most but not all of whom were killed ... Say 250,000 dead ... 4 spikes each). Many of these may have been recovered by kandra and turned into Pathan earrings though.

 

 

[JustQuestin2004 he/him]

58 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

Yeah, the battle at the end of HoA would have left something like a million spikes behind (300,000 koloss, most but not all of whom were killed ... Say 250,000 dead ... 4 spikes each). Many of these may have been recovered by kandra and turned into Pathan earrings though.

Wow, really puts it into perspective of just how little life was worth to the Final Empire doesn't it.

1 million people killed to make an army of barely controllable monsters.

Though I'm pretty sure the vast majority of those spikes were lost during the Catacendre, when Harmony remade the world, there were no piles of Koloss corpses mentioned in the aftermath, and I doubt Harmony would want to leave them all just lying around so he may have just destroyed the Spikes in the dead Koloss.