Shardblades after death (spoilers)

[TheOneKEA]

I've just started a reread of The Way of Kings, and I immediately noticed that in the first chapter, after Gavilar dies from his wound there is a delay before the king's Shardblade materializes. This suggests to me that the ten second interval between the request to summon a Blade and the actual summoning also occurs when it is involuntarily summoned after the wielder's death.

This leads to a number of follow-on questions:

- Does the involuntary summoning of a Blade start after the last heartbeat (death of the Physical body), the last coherent thought in the dying wielder's mind (death of the Cognitive mind) or after the wielder's Spirit goes somewhere?

- What happens if a wielder's heart stops long enough for the Blade to appear and then the wielder's is resusciated?

- What happens if a wielder's Cognitive activity ceases (e.g. oxygen deprivation) long enough for the Blade to appear and then the wielder wakes up?

[Glaring at the Survivor he/him]

Ten heartbeats to summon a Shardblade. Not seconds.

[TheOneKEA]

Ten heartbeats to summon a Shardblade. Not seconds.

Well, that's embarrassing - I obviously meant to say heartbeats and said seconds instead :-/

This raises even more questions though - how does a Shardblade get involuntarily summoned if a wielder's heart stops or their brain activity ceases as a result of dying? Is it entirely Spiritual?

[Argent he/him]

Is it clear that there is delay? I always assumed the Blade appeared as soon as its owner died, and delay Szeth might perceive can easily attributed to the fact that determining the exact time of death is not very easy without sophisticated medical equipment. It's not like Szeth was sitting there, measuring Gavilar's vitals...

[TheOneKEA]

Is it clear that there is delay? I always assumed the Blade appeared as soon as its owner died, and delay Szeth might perceive can easily attributed to the fact that determining the exact time of death is not very easy without sophisticated medical equipment. It's not like Szeth was sitting there, measuring Gavilar's vitals...

It's not clear, but the structure of the description of Szeth watching Gavilar suggests that there is a delay of some type. There's at least enough if a delay for Szeth to notice the guards yelling in the background after Gavilar's death.

[Gloom he/him]

More than one Shardbearer died in TWoKs. If you really want to check the evidence, I would suggest looking for corroboration with the Shardbearer that Kaladin killed. If there is a delay, then there is a delay, if not, then not. A dead man has no heartbeat, so I can't understand why a delay would exist once the spiritual link to the Blades bearer was snuffed out.

[name_here]

Well, "death" is kind of a nebulous term in a number of ways. People have been revived as much as an hour after their hearts stopped beating, although only in very cold situations. Since the link is spiritual, I expect the Shardblade would emerge whenever someone became sufficently dead that totally reconstructing their entire physical body and restoring it to prime condition would not result in a successful revival, which TES demonstrates is a thing that can happen in the Cosmere.

[Glaring at the Survivor he/him]

TES?

You guys have so many acronyms.

[Argent he/him]

The Emperor's Soul

[junior]

Well, "death" is kind of a nebulous term in a number of ways. People have been revived as much as an hour after their hearts stopped beating, although only in very cold situations. Since the link is spiritual, I expect the Shardblade would emerge whenever someone became sufficently dead that totally reconstructing their entire physical body and restoring it to prime condition would not result in a successful revival, which TES demonstrates is a thing that can happen in the Cosmere.

 

Regarding the TES comment -

 

Isn't that just a case of an apparently permanent coma?  IIRC, the Emperor's body is still alive, but his mind is gone.

[Swimmingly he/him]

Regarding the TES comment -

 

Isn't that just a case of an apparently permanent coma?  IIRC, the Emperor's body is still alive, but his mind is gone.

I would call permanent coma, wherein your mind, memories, and personality are not only dormant but entirely gone, dead. This is the state that people considered dead enough to be, legally, no longer people, but organic organ maintenance devices are in.

[Shardlet he/him]

He was brain dead, but not physically dead.  A vegetable, to use the vernacular.  A key element in the case of the Emperor is that nothing was needed to keep him alive other than normal nutrition.  There was no life support equipment artificially keeping him alive.

[name_here]

Personally, I think what happened is that he died and then his corpse was fixed up. Physically, he was completely fine, but as an empty shell with nothing inside. Sure, the body was alive, but I don't think it really qualifies as him as far as the magical aspects are concerned.

Yes, he does successfully receive a highly personalized and intricate soulstamp, but that just means Shai managed to fast-talk reality into thinking he'd survived and recovered. She made a copy of his original soul and stuck that into his body, and the stamp took because it was plausible he could have woken up after a lengthy coma

[Beautor he/him]

name_here, on 19 Nov 2013 - 12:35 PM, said:

Personally, I think what happened is that he died and then his corpse was fixed up. Physically, he was completely fine, but as an empty shell with nothing inside. Sure, the body was alive, but I don't think it really qualifies as him as far as the magical aspects are concerned.

Yes, he does successfully receive a highly personalized and intricate soulstamp, but that just means Shai managed to fast-talk reality into thinking he'd survived and recovered. She made a copy of his original soul and stuck that into his body, and the stamp took because it was plausible he could have woken up after a lengthy coma

I disagree with you that the emperor died, although it's just a very minor difference. It has happened many times that people receive traumatic brain injuries that severely alter memory and personality without affecting motor functions. Look at Phineas Gage. He got a railroad spike through his brain and lived. The spike entered through his cheek and exited through the top of his head. Physically he was essentially normal after his wounds healed, but his personality and memory were severely changed. This is almost exactly what happened to the emperor. Another example is Henry Molaison. He was subjected to a frontal lobotomy in an attempt to treat epilepsy. He completely lost his ability to form long term memory, and was completely stuck in the now moment.

I believe what Shai did was simply recreate the Emperor's lost personality, memories, etc. through the soul stamp, thus filling the empty sheet of his brain, so to speak. I suspect that if the resealing surgeons were also skilled in soul stamping like Shai they would have been able to completely heal the Emperor with his memory intact, rather than just healing his flesh.

I'm not sure if that needed to be in spoiler tags, but I'll try to be safe.

All that being said (sorry about the tangent) I agree that the appearance of the shardblade is tied to the separation of the spiritual soul from the physical body. I believe that a person can still remain conscious for several seconds after their heart stops beating, or stops beating properly (like a heartattack type situation). That would likely be similar to the 10 heart beats.

Edited November 19, 2013 by Beautor

[11thorderknight]

Sorry, gotta jump in here - what you said above about real-world examples of brain injury just isn't accurate. Phineas Gage, and everyone who's ever been lobotomized, or had personality changes because of surgery or strokes, etc, sustained physical damage to very specific parts of their brain. In the case of Gage, he sustained damage to the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher-order behavior and impulse control. The lobotomy cases are similar, and basically removed motivation from people. The people who lost short-term memory all had damage to specific parts of the temporal lobe (i forget which one, but its' well described). 

 

People who are in a "vegetative state" have damage to the entire cerebrum, and therefore have no personality or consciousness left; all they have are autonomic functions (breathing, etc) and reflexes. People who are "brain-dead" don't even have that, and require a machine to breathe for them.

 

My point is that all of these are specific physical injuries, the same way that a broken arm is different from a broken leg. Applying this to TES, if the Emperor had been "alive" in the in-world spiritual sense, then healing his body of injuries would have also healed all the "brain damage" as well. I believe that the proper way to look at this is that the resealers got there too late, and basically healed a dead body.

[Shardlet he/him]

Or, alternatively, that the resealers did not understand how to heal the brain injury or even recognize that there was a brain injury of that nature until it was too late.

[Beautor he/him]

Sorry, gotta jump in here - what you said above about real-world examples of brain injury just isn't accurate. Phineas Gage, and everyone who's ever been lobotomized, or had personality changes because of surgery or strokes, etc, sustained physical damage to very specific parts of their brain. In the case of Gage, he sustained damage to the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher-order behavior and impulse control. The lobotomy cases are similar, and basically removed motivation from people. The people who lost short-term memory all had damage to specific parts of the temporal lobe (i forget which one, but its' well described). 

 

People who are in a "vegetative state" have damage to the entire cerebrum, and therefore have no personality or consciousness left; all they have are autonomic functions (breathing, etc) and reflexes. People who are "brain-dead" don't even have that, and require a machine to breathe for them.

 

My point is that all of these are specific physical injuries, the same way that a broken arm is different from a broken leg. Applying this to TES, if the Emperor had been "alive" in the in-world spiritual sense, then healing his body of injuries would have also healed all the "brain damage" as well. I believe that the proper way to look at this is that the resealers got there too late, and basically healed a dead body.

 

I don't disagree with you that the two examples I suggested are different from the Emperor's siutation. I used them because they are quite famous and easily searchable and they show that a person can suffer an extreme brain altering injury and still live. I agree that the Emperor's situation is closer to a persistive vegitative state with basic motor function than Phineas Gage. I still maintain that Henry Molaison's situation is closer to the Emperor's. His lobotomy resulted in his complete inability to form and retain memories for more than a few minutes. Studying him was the foundation of much of our understanding of the neurobiology of brain function and memory. We studied him in almost all of my neuroscience and psychology classes. I suspect that the difference with the Emperor is that since his brain was healed (resealed) that if he had of been provided with stimuli to help him learn he would have eventually been able to relearn many things, however he would likely have been a completely different person.

 

Or, alternatively, that the resealers did not understand how to heal the brain injury or even recognize that there was a brain injury of that nature until it was too late.

 

This is the point I was getting at. I suspect that the resealers did not understand the nuances of neuroanatomy and simply healed the brain injury to a pure unaltered form, just like they would an arm or chest injury, not realizing that this combined with the brain injury wiped the Emperor's memory clean, leaving him as a blank slate waiting for input.

 

Either way, I'm sorry for derailing this discussion from the topic of how long it takes shardblades to appear after the shardbearer's death. Back on that topic, I just reread Kaladin's fight with the mystery shardbearer, and I'm not sure that example is very helpful to the discussion since the shardbearer was holding his shardblade when he was killed and it never dissappeared. It just slips from his fingers as he falls and slices into the ground.

Edited November 20, 2013 by Beautor

[Shardlet he/him]

I think it is at least marginally helpful.  Consider, the shardblade dropped but did not disappear.  Thus, no apparent delay between death and unbonding.