Infusion and Cohesion

[Riino He/Him]

Can't windrunners infuse the ground to prevent the Deepest Ones from using Cohesion to move through, effectively freezing the Deepest Ones in stone like what happened when the sibling re-awakened. Couldn't Kaladin use this in ROW to just freeze them?

 

"Cohesion is highly resisted by Investiture, and even a small amount of Stormlight in an object would prevent it from working." 

- Coppermind on Cohesion

[Returned he/him]

Investiture tends to make it hard for other Investiture to interact with something, so even if infusing the ground wouldn't lock the Deepest Ones in place I would bet that it would cause a big problem for them moving around. I have two questions which might impact the tactic:

1. How much matter is infused via the mechanism you describe? It might be just surface level, though we also haven't seen anyone break free of being bound that way while tearing up any of the thing they were stuck to. So maybe there's more to it. But if Kaladin can't just infuse a prism of volume in the ground it may not work the way you imagine (though maybe it could work in other ways).
2. Is it worthwhile compared to other options for fighting and especially using Stormlight? It takes Stormlight to do the infusion and to keep the effect going. In the way I'm imagining this working it would only confine the Deepest Ones rather than killing them and so might not be the best way to use Stormlight in combat-- a Shardblade into the ground is almost as easy but could kill or wound the Fused.

[Xanpheon]

On 11/10/2025 at 11:53 PM, Riino said:

Can't windrunners infuse the ground to prevent the Deepest Ones from using Cohesion to move through, effectively freezing the Deepest Ones in stone like what happened when the sibling re-awakened. Couldn't Kaladin use this in ROW to just freeze them?

 

"Cohesion is highly resisted by Investiture, and even a small amount of Stormlight in an object would prevent it from working." 

- Coppermind on Cohesion

Let me use the example of Ishar disabling the Windrunners to poke a hole in your theory:

Adhesion, when we've seen it so far, is less "infusing an object" and more connecting one object to another.  When we see him using it to attach himself to walls, it's small scale, and only really acts on the very surface to bond - say - a hand to a wall, or the soles of some shoes. Surface level, small-scale, and focused on a single area. 

To stop the Deepest ones you would need to infuse the entire surface of the rock at least, and that would be very difficult. Ishar created a connection - a different type, with Bondsmith powers rather than Windrunners, but still a connection with Adhesion - with the ground, making almost all the stormlight flood from them into the ground below.