WoK opening scene

[Terrisman]

How do you kill a sleepless?

[Treamayne]

49 minutes ago, Terrisman said:

How do you kill a sleepless?

WoB:

Spoiler

Edited for Length and Relevance

Brandon Sanderson

Depends on which definition of immortal you mean.

Doesn't age, but can be killed by conventional means. (You've seen some of these in the cosmere, but I'll leave you to discuss who.)

Heals from wounds, but still ages. (Knights Radiant with Stormlight are like this.)

Reborn when killed. (The Heralds.)

Doesn't age and can heal, but dependent upon magic to stay this way, and so have distinct weakness to be exploited. (The Lord Ruler, among others.)

Hive beings who are constantly losing individual members, but maintaining a persistent personality spread across all of them, immortal in that as long as too much of the hive isn't wiped out, the personality can persist. (The Sleepless.)

Bits of sapient magic, eternal and endless, though the personality can be "destroyed" in specific ways. (Seons. Spren. Nightblood. Cognitive Shadows, like a certain character from Scadrial.)

Shards (Really just a supercharged version of the previous category.)

And then, of course, there's Hoid. I'm not going to say which category, if any, he's in.

Some of these blend together--the Heralds, for example, are technically a variety of Cognitive Shadow. I'm not saying each of these categories above are distinct, intended to be the end-all definitions. They're off the cuff groupings I made to explain a point: immortality is a theme of the cosmere works--which, at their core, are experiments on what happens when men are given the power of deity.

Stormlight Three Update #5 (Nov. 29, 2016)

Hope that helps

[Terrisman]

52 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

WoB:

  Reveal hidden contents

Edited for Length and Relevance

Brandon Sanderson

Depends on which definition of immortal you mean.

Doesn't age, but can be killed by conventional means. (You've seen some of these in the cosmere, but I'll leave you to discuss who.)

Heals from wounds, but still ages. (Knights Radiant with Stormlight are like this.)

Reborn when killed. (The Heralds.)

Doesn't age and can heal, but dependent upon magic to stay this way, and so have distinct weakness to be exploited. (The Lord Ruler, among others.)

Hive beings who are constantly losing individual members, but maintaining a persistent personality spread across all of them, immortal in that as long as too much of the hive isn't wiped out, the personality can persist. (The Sleepless.)

Bits of sapient magic, eternal and endless, though the personality can be "destroyed" in specific ways. (Seons. Spren. Nightblood. Cognitive Shadows, like a certain character from Scadrial.)

Shards (Really just a supercharged version of the previous category.)

And then, of course, there's Hoid. I'm not going to say which category, if any, he's in.

Some of these blend together--the Heralds, for example, are technically a variety of Cognitive Shadow. I'm not saying each of these categories above are distinct, intended to be the end-all definitions. They're off the cuff groupings I made to explain a point: immortality is a theme of the cosmere works--which, at their core, are experiments on what happens when men are given the power of deity.

Stormlight Three Update #5 (Nov. 29, 2016)

Hope that helps

So if they (it?) were smart they would hide enough of themselves so that they can’t be killed. 
Although then it sounds like they’re at risk of those hordelings breaking off and becoming its own Sleepless

[Treamayne]

8 minutes ago, Terrisman said:

So if they (it?) were smart they would hide enough of themselves so that they can’t be killed. 
Although then it sounds like they’re at risk of those hordelings breaking off and becoming its own Sleepless

The problem is, we do not yet know enough about them or their physiology. For example, we know a Sleepless can be Radiant.

Spoiler

alercah

The Sleepless presumably do not want her to swear a Radiant oath because she would be able to use the Dawnshard in conjunction with Surgebinding, and we know that that combination already destroyed one planet in the system so it's pretty understandable.

But there were a bunch of Soulcasters lying around and they didn't seem bothered. So is this one of the differences between Radiant Soulcasting and Soulcasting via the fabrial? That the Dawnshard cannot be used alongside the fabrial?

Brandon Sanderson

So, the Sleepless ARE capable of Radiant bonds. (I believe the back jacket of the first book implies as much, if I remember correctly.) However, things they at first thought were great are making them increasingly worried, for reasons that will come up (not related to them specifically) in this book and the next.

Soulcasting via a fabrial is way, way less dangerous than Radiant Soulcasting--which is in turn far less dangerous than unbound Soulcasting (meaning without oaths.)

FirebreatherRay

We've seen that the interpretation of the oaths is largely up to each individual spren (to the point that we've seen an entire Order of Radiants change their allegiance). Would it be possible for there to be a "sociopathic spren" that has interpreted the oaths so radically differently from the rest of their kind that it appears, to an outsider, that they are unbound in the same way the wielder of an honorblade is unbound? Or is there something essential about the nature of spren that prevents this?

Brandon Sanderson

I think that spren could go further than we've seen so far, and indeed, many of the older Skybreakers might be horrified by how far their order has gone. However, there are SOME fundamentals that even a spren with a very different interpretation wouldn't be able to abandon.

Dawnshard Annotations Reddit Q&A (Nov. 6, 2020)

But we don't know what percentage of their Hordelings are required to form a body to hold the bond and wield the Surges. We don't know if that immortality WoB means les than 50% of hordlings die, or maybe more like 80+%. We don't know how many hordlings Nikliasorm, for example, was using to make his body on Rysn's Wandersail (was it only 50% of his available hordlings? less? more?)

There simply is not enough information to extrapolate an answer - all we know for certain is that at least one Sleepless died at Aharietiam. Or maybe not - maybe it was just that body of Hordlings, but the Sleepless to whom they belonged survived?

[Terrisman]

1 hour ago, Treamayne said:But we don't know what percentage of their Hordelings are required to form a body to hold the bond and wield the Surges. 

And do we even know they need to form a humanoid body to wild the surges? Why wouldn’t they be able to use them in some form of pile of hordelings as well

[Duxredux he/him]

Hum... I'm going to be making some assumptions here.

Assumption 1 is that there is a distinct mechanism that allows a Sleepless to think, communicate, and coordinate with all of the individuals within the horde. Hordelings can spread across a sizeable percentage of a planet if I recall, which is beyond the range and scope of most of the basic applications of Invested Arts we've seen. From this my guess is that the Sleepless function similar to one of the entities from Timothy Zahn's Quadrail series (the specific name is a spoiler) in that it basically is a distributed brain that uses Connection instead of conventional synapses to think and coordinate its distributed body. 

On a related note, assumption 2 is that as the individual hordelings die or otherwise become disConnected from the other hordelings the Sleepless as a whole loses intelligence and whatever memories or skills stored within the tiny mind and brain of the individual hordeling. There will be redundancy of course, but this is killing the mind of the Sleepless which will need to reproduce to build up a buffer.

As for trying to kill a Sleepless, it would be super costly and it would be difficult to know if you had truly succeeded considering they can swim, fly, (probably)burrow, and imitate the local animals. The larger hordeling, up to house-sized, presumably are much rarer and take much longer to grow and develop than the smaller ones, and likely as a result will not have evolutionary adaptations seen in the younger hordelings. Small ones can be exterminated using similar principles to killing insects or small rodents. Small bodies are susceptible to heat as they have a high surface-area to volume ratio. Poisons and oxygen deprivation will similarly kill small insects and animals faster and more effectively because they generally have accelerated metabolism rates that burn through their intake rapidly. A Dustbringer cutting a flaming wall, Soulcaster creating a wall of pitch, or perhaps vacuums created by Windrunners or Skybreakers could work, but it would need to be done on a massive scale even just to defend. If we find anything that could disrupt or directly attack a Sleepless through the Connection between the hordelings, that would probably be the most effective.

 

As an aside, let's look at Surgebinding. My assumption is that the Stormlight a small individual hordeling can hold is pretty minimal so a seemingly innocuous cremling will not be able to do any major Surgebinding. It would take greater mass and greater storage for anything significant. Considering it seems that at least early Ideal Radiants cannot be too far separated from their spren without negative effects, I suspect distant hordelings would not have access to the Surges. Not sure what proximity to the spren's location they would need, maybe a bit further than the range squires can be powered by Radiants would make sense.