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Kandra question


Senor Feesh

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Sorry for obscure title, didn't want to give things away for people yet to read these books.

I'm curious about TenSoon - we know from Sanderson than TenSoon imitates someone in AoL (pretty sure it's now confirmed as Bretton), but how did he survive the Resolution? Did any other Kandra survive/get remade?

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Did any other Kandra survive/get remade?
The Kandra.

Yes, they live. The people were smart enough, eventually, to replace their spikes. (And there were a couple who were on assignment who made it to storage caches.)

However, there will likely never be any more of them, since Hemalurgy is required to make them. They are now some of the few people who can communicate directly with Sazed, who—like Ruin—can whisper to people most easily when they are connected to him via spikes. With some speculation, you can probably guess what kind of roles the Kandra will end up playing in future books.

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  • 4 weeks later...
How intelligent is a mistwraith? Could you raise and train mistwraiths like dogs or horses, controlling what forms they take by the bones you give them? Would you be able to train yourself a horsewraith steed by giving it only the bones of a horse?

This is feasible. One thing to keep in mind is that mistwraiths are people who have a blockage between the physical and the cognitive realm, messing with their ability to think. Think of them as mentally-stunted people. There's enough there to train, but then you have to dig into the ethics of it...

This is an interesting tidbit I found in the Q&A. From this response, it seems like the conciousness of a kandra does not come from its blessings, but rather from the cognitive aspect that was previously blocked. This means that, rather than providing a consciousness (likely stolen from the human the spike came from), the spikes are really only creating some sort of connecting between the cognitive and physical aspects of the mistwraith.

To me, this makes sense, because if conciousness were tied to the spikes themselves, then TenSoon's use of OreSeur's spikes should have also given him an aspect of OreSeur's consciousness. However, if the spikes are merely a catalyst for creating consciousness, rather than the provider of it, TenSoon's steady identity makes more sense. This also means that, it doesn't matter WHICH blessings the kandra would have gotten, as long as they received a blessing, the connection between their cognitive and physical aspects should have been restored.

I don't think the spikes remove the blockage entirely, otherwise the kandra wouldn't need their blessings necessarily to remain kandra. Since they turned back into mistwraiths, I think the blessings more act as a bridge or bypass around said blockage.

What do you guys think?

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Interesting. Is it possibly this workaround which also makes them vulnerable to outside control?

That is, Hemalurgic spikes are common to all Hemalurgic creations, and they each give access to something that was previously outside the spiked person's soul. Brandon once used the term "hack" to refer to how this works. Thus you have the (physical) metal, giving somebody else' (spiritual) powers to the person spiked. It sounds almost like the power has been *rerouted* somehow. Maybe Hemalurgic spikes are "conductors" which, among other things, transmit spiritual power from one spiritweb to another, perhaps by going through the cognitive realm. Then adding spikes to kandra would, almost as a side-effect, create an open connection to the cognitive realm, allowing them to finally grow up mentally.

These spikes would also be more exposed to the rest of the world, and presumably other magics which affect the cognitive realm, than the original spirit. Thus they provide a short-cut into the Hemalurgic creation which is easier to use than normal, say, mental external Allomancy.

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