Harmony at full power 100%

[Thanatos]

If the Scadrial system and all its people were destroyed would Harmony be at full power. Aka both the old shards Preservation and Ruin (now Harmony) would get back its invested investiture.

I think so. What do you guys think.

[Calderis]

Considering they literally created the planet, I think that everything would have to be completely obliterated in order to fully divest. 

[Dragon314]

I doubt it, based on one scene. 

Spoiler

When they burn the atium in HOA, ruin doesn't get the power.

However, perhaps you could get a huge cosmere theorist.

Storm it! Where is @Stormgate when you need him? Freaking california that's where.

How is your rep count so low with 162 posts?

[Spoolofwhool]

1 hour ago, Calderis said:

Considering they literally created the planet, I think that everything would have to be completely obliterated in order to fully divest. 

They didn't actually. The atoms that make up Scadrial were not formed from their investiture, but is still permeated by their investiture nonetheless. 

1 hour ago, Dragon314 said:

I doubt it, based on one scene. 

  Reveal hidden contents

When they burn the atium in HOA, ruin doesn't get the power.

 

Atium isn't a good example since it was specifically placed in a system which excluded it from being a part of the greater of Ruin's being. 

[Thanatos]

Isnt there a WoB saying once investiture is used up (metals, stormlight, breaths etc) it goes back into the system and is reused.

Wouldnt deinvesting be the same?

[Ari]

1 hour ago, Thanatos said:

Isnt there a WoB saying once investiture is used up (metals, stormlight, breaths etc) it goes back into the system and is reused.

Wouldnt deinvesting be the same?

Depends. If Ruin had found the Atium before it was burned, he likely would have pulled the power into himself first, rather than immediately used it.

But sure, once Ruin took action with that power, it would effectively go through the same process as burned Atium, returning to his perpendicularity after some time.

Also, worth noting is that if Sazed takes all that Atium back into his system, he's no longer really Harmony. He's just a slightly less unbalanced version of Ruin. He's probably quite deliberately doing something with that excess power that doesn't require him to hold onto it.

[Spoolofwhool]

29 minutes ago, Ari said:

Also, worth noting is that if Sazed takes all that Atium back into his system, he's no longer really Harmony. He's just a slightly less unbalanced version of Ruin. He's probably quite deliberately doing something with that excess power that doesn't require him to hold onto it.

What do you mean by this? Why it no longer be Harmony? It's still Ruin and Preservation's power together, even if the power is destabilized towards Ruin. 

31 minutes ago, Ari said:

Depends. If Ruin had found the Atium before it was burned, he likely would have pulled the power into himself first, rather than immediately used it.

But sure, once Ruin took action with that power, it would effectively go through the same process as burned Atium, returning to his perpendicularity after some time.

Once Ruin took in the power, I think it would be reintegrated into his greater being, no longer the separate system that Preservation created. Therefore, it should be used and cycled like how a shard regularly uses its investiture. 

[Calderis]

41 minutes ago, Ari said:

Also, worth noting is that if Sazed takes all that Atium back into his system, he's no longer really Harmony. He's just a slightly less unbalanced version of Ruin. He's probably quite deliberately doing something with that excess power that doesn't require him to hold onto it.

There may be more of Preservation invested into the humans of Scadrial, but it's still a roughly equal. It's (obvious estimation) 55/45 and what you're saying makes it sound like more of an 80/20 split. 

[Ari]

12 minutes ago, Spoolofwhool said:

What do you mean by this? Why it no longer be Harmony? It's still Ruin and Preservation's power together, even if the power is destabilized towards Ruin. 

Once Ruin took in the power, I think it would be reintegrated into his greater being, no longer the separate system that Preservation created. Therefore, it should be used and cycled like how a shard regularly uses its investiture. 

He's something pretty close to Harmony, sure, but not exactly the same if he's not doing something with that extra bit of Ruin. If he hung onto it, he'd still be a lot more harmonious than Ruin was, but he'd also be more prone to revolution, to change, to destruction than he would to preservation, conservatism, etc...

 

2 minutes ago, Calderis said:

There may be more of Preservation invested into the humans of Scadrial, but it's still a roughly equal. It's (obvious estimation) 55/45 and what you're saying makes it sound like more of an 80/20 split. 

What I'm saying is that for instance, if you have a "centrist" political party that's 55% right-wing and 45% left-wing, they're not centrists anymore, they're centre-right. If Harmony takes on the extra Ruin, his intent will change, even if it's only subtle, it will add up over time. So it's likely he's doing something with it, as Sazed believes he should be Harmony.

[Yuoaman]

I also imagine there's a (probably insignificant in the grand scheme of things) portion of Harmony's Investiture that exists far beyond the borders of the Scadrial system. You'd probably have to obliterate most of the cosmere for any Shard to regain the fullness of its power.

[Ari]

16 hours ago, FiveLate said:

You seem to be equating Investiture and Intent as the same thing.  I cannot agree with that.  Investiture itself does not have desires and purpose.  It simply follows realistic law.   Ruins Intent never changed or weakened when part of his power was locked away.  Preservation Intent was not changed by adding more to humanity.  Therefore it stands to reason that Harmony's intent would not alter.  

I'm not making a false equivalence. This is a thing that's well-supported by WoBs, FiveLate. I think it's even in the Mistborn annotations, too. Intent is attached to the investiture which composes a Shard's body, which is why Atium tended to be used to violent effect, for instance, as opposed to mere self-preservation. (there was also the fact that it was so expensive you tended to use it in extremis, but that still wouldn't rule out running as a valid option...) I'm not sure why I've been getting so much pushback on this when it was like, one of the first things people started theorising about after AoL came out and we had eyes on Harmony, and it was literally just a small anecdote on why we should assume Brandon is in fact implying that Harmony is doing something with that extra Power that Ruin has in comparison to Preservation. The reason people were so keen to establish that he was doing something with Ruin's extra power was because they were worried it would unbalance his Intent.

It may be that there's investiture out there that's not from the Shattering that is neutral of intent, or that has a different Intent to the sixteen shards, but as far as we can tell, every piece that composed the body of Adonalsium has some Intent attached to it. Presumably even the Dor is some mixture of Dominion and Devotion, (presumably, half of each) despite having no Vessel or magical sapience of its own to easily express its Intent through. But it's quite possible that Intent is limited only to the investiture that composes each Shard's body. I make no judgement on naturally-occured investiture that predates/doesn't relate to Adonalsium.

But ask yourself this: If you could drain investiture from a Shard's body without its Intent affecting you, why hasn't Odium tried to do it? It's an obvious tactic given his objection to combining with other Shards is that he doesn't want to change his own Intent.

Ruin's Intent didn't change when preservation siphoned off his extra power into Atium because he went from being 100% Ruin to being 100% Ruin, just with less investiture overall in the second 100%. Harmony's intent would change if he weren't doing something with that extra Ruin, as he would go from being 50% Preservation and 50% Ruin to some imbalanced number, like 55%/45% or 51%/49%. I'm honestly a little bit surprised that anyone thinks that the ratio of power from one shard to another wouldn't affect the combined Intent of, to borrow a political term, a Shard of Shards. (ie. a Shard composed of multiple Shards mixed together by one Vessel) This can't happen to an uncombined Shard, because if it gives away any of its investiture, there's no ratio to worry about. Endowment is still 100% Endowment when she gives away a Splinter to a new Returned.

[Calderis]

@Ari makes perfect sense, and I don't disagree with the principle.

My only sticking point is the variance allowed in a "balance." 

[Yata]

44 minutes ago, FiveLate said:

@Ari I wasn't very clear in what I was trying to say.  At the time harmony came into being, the atium horde collected by TLR via the Kanda had been burned up.  The Pits were shattered.  Therefore either the Investiture had returned to Ruin, or was stuck in some temporal limbo....it does not matter which, but the second offers some interesting issues with splinters.

The Pits still have all the Ruin's Investiture also if they was not producing Atium. Kelsier only destroyes the release valve for a while, but the Ruin's stolen Investiture was still stack in the Pits.

46 minutes ago, FiveLate said:

My point is that Harmony took up both powers at the moment...everything that was available to him.....and they combined into 1 new shard.  The ratio of what was Ruin and Preservation became = to 1 Harmony.   His metal being unstable is the result of Harmony itself being unstable. Harmony has to involve change....otherwise it is static Preservation.  Ex.  Predator prey population cycles.  Both very significantly, but in a harmonious system, revolve around a median self correcting. 

while I think the Harmonium is also unbalanced toward Ruin, this is not the reason it's is unstable. Brandon stated the Harmonium is unstable because it's a single substance with the association with both Ruin and Preservation (rather for example to an alloy Lerasium-Atium where everypart is just associate with a single Shard) and this conflictual natura gives to the Harmonium his unstable proprierties. The Harmonium explode when it lose the association with the Shards (one or with both...we don't know) and this lost is released in the physical as energy. (There is a WoB on this matter).

 

[Ari]

1 hour ago, FiveLate said:

@Ari I wasn't very clear in what I was trying to say.  At the time harmony came into being, the atium horde collected by TLR via the Kanda had been burned up.  The Pits were shattered.  Therefore either the Investiture had returned to Ruin, or was stuck in some temporal limbo....it does not matter which, but the second offers some interesting issues with splinters.

My point is that Harmony took up both powers at the moment...everything that was available to him.....and they combined into 1 new shard.  The ratio of what was Ruin and Preservation became = to 1 Harmony.   His metal being unstable is the result of Harmony itself being unstable. Harmony has to involve change....otherwise it is static Preservation.  Ex.  Predator prey population cycles.  Both very significantly, but in a harmonious system, revolve around a median self correcting. 

Locking one percent of his power into metallic form should not change the ratio of what Harmony is because the other 99 percent is identical.   It is not 2 separate Investiture sources fighting, but 1.  There is a WOB that says Harmony could have become Discord instead. Ill try to find it.  But the past tense was used.  So I read that as, that moment has passed.    Maybe a good question would be.  Could harmony still become Discord?   I hope I made my thoughts made this clearer.

I will have to go back and read the chemistry of the gods thread again I think before I could go more in-depth.  

As a side note, I really hope you prove me wrong and that shards to loose a bit of their intent when the sequester it somewhere and can control which part because it would make a theory I have playing around with sooo much easier to connect everything together.

Edit:

On a third read through I think we are saying a lot of the same thing and the hangup is what happens with Investiture that was a godmetal at the time and how harmony godmetal is composed.

 

 

Yeah, I think you're a little closer to understanding what I was saying now. I was referring to the fact that some small fraction of Preservation's power is bound up in the Scadrian people, aligning them ever so slightly in favour of his Intent, and that thus a "full power" Harmony, so long as those Scadrians are alive and holding that extra bit of Preservation, is technically one that's a little more Ruinous than Sazed has been so far in Era 2, because he does in fact have the ability to recover the bit of Investiture that Leras hid away when he was still Preservation's Vessel.

Brandon has said that if someone killed Sazed as of Era 2, he would drop Harmony, and not Ruin and Preservation. That doesn't mean that the integration of the two shards together is instant, (remember, it has been hundreds of years since Era 1, so there has been a lot of time for a gradual integration to progress, so we really don't know which way things got to where they are now until Sazed or Brandon tells us) and that doesn't mean that What Harmony Is isn't a combination of Ruin and Preservation in the states Sazed found them, which were balanced only because Ruin's extra investiture had been locked up in metallic Atium he couldn't access, and that Atium was temporarily inaccessible because it had been burned by Elend's army of Seers. (Remember, the analogy Brandon has used several times regarding Harmony is that a King of two countries is still a King. We have an example of that in real life: The United Kingdom, which is a country composed of four other countries, and has a single royal family for all four. We can meaningfully talk about the balance of power between England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland the same way we can talk about the imbalance between Ruin and Preservation- if you honestly tried to argue all four are equally influential within the Union, most people who live there would not take you seriously at all) If he tries to pick up that power for whatever reason and doesn't put it back into metal or something else that's not his own Vessel, his Intent will gradually change to something just a little more Ruinous than the name Harmony would imply, (The name "discord" is going to far. Perhaps Discontent, Progress, or Revolution, maybe) the same way that Preservation and Ruin's intents are presumably changing as they integrate into Harmony. Likewise, if Sazed left Atium's power in the ground or wherever he's put it, but somehow reclaimed Preservation's power from all the humans on his planet, (say there's a mass extinction he doesn't manage to stop and they all die, for instance) he'd cease being entirely Harmony in the way he is now, and become something slightly closer to Preservation.

We don't know for sure where the extra Ruin is at the moment. Just before Sazed's ascension, it was in the "Atium cycle," and would have formed into geodes once the Pits of Hathsin healed after Kelsier's destruction of them, however the Pits are no longer a Perpendicularity as of Era 2, (speculation is that Harmony has a new Perpendicularity) so if Harmony has left that power on its own, it would by default coalesce at his new perpendicularity, making the manifestation of his power there slightly more ruinous than balanced, but we honestly don't know for sure that that's actually what's going on with the power. Sazed might have put it to good use somewhere else that it's actually needed, and the Harmonium that's coalescing from his use of Investiture on Scadrial actually is balanced in terms of Ruin's and Preservation's power, or he might have created some Atium out of it but not put it anywhere that the general public would find out, possibly so that Marsh had continued access to Atium into the future. (The Lost Metal is a suggestive name in this regard, although it could equally refer to Harmonium given what the Malwish were saying about Preservation and Ruin always having been one...)

[Yata]

1 hour ago, FiveLate said:

 

@Yata please point me in the direction of that WOB ....heartland, reddit, forums? Not sure what ore where to search, but the wording might be important.

I could not find the exact wording but it's a @Ironeyes 's WoB ( I hope he could link the right post with the proper wording) for now:

Quote

Harmonium's instability IS caused by some of the subatomic particles being of Ruin and some of Preservation.

Harmonium is NOT an alloy, but rather a complete metal. Its particles are NOT composed of investiture, but have a "spiritual identity" that associates them with one of the shards. A portion of the energy that comprises the explosion when harmonium touches water is energy being pulled directly from the spiritual realm and the particles thus losing their spiritual association with one of the shards. Due to this, there is no such thing as Harmonium Oxide, although he did add a cryptic comment that there is "something else" left behind after the explosion which is "interesting" and will be important to Scadrial's future. 

At this point I figured I couldn't hold up the line much longer and started fishing for a RAFO card. So I asked about Harmonium's nuclear potential. But get this: He didn't RAFO it!! He said that harmonium can't actually create a nuclear explosion but it does something analogous which will be "very important" to the cosmere in the future. He explained that this is because he essentially added a third state of matter, since investiture is analogous to energy and matter where one can be transformed into the others through the right processes. So harmonium can create an effect that is somehow similar to a nuclear explosion but instead of transforming matter into energy, it does something with investiture. He didn't elaborate after that. 

Regard your last post, with the exception of something cut off from the Shard (for example Ruin's stolen power) if a Shard manifest some part of himself (the Lerasium, the Mist, the Well,ecc...) those thing are still part of himself, he lose no power to making them. Sure upon use they will not be avaliable for a while but they will return to the Shard.

You may find a WoB about the Spren and how they were still part of Honor while he was alive, his power was not reduced from them.

[Yata]

7 minutes ago, FiveLate said:

Ahh...but the interesting part of what you said does not specify who cuts it off.....Could a shard cut off part of its own power or intent?

A Shard could indeed cut off part of his own power (but I hardly could imagine a scenario where he want to do it).

Cutting part of the intent is not possible under normal cases. Every bit of Investiture is bounded to the Intent so unless you drop the Shard you could not cut off the Intent.

Sure special beings, like Harmony could do this, but only because he is exposed to multiple intents. So he could cut off a part of Ruin/Preservation to regulate his Intent. This is not a praticable way for a normal Shard as his monolithic Intent will be not altered....Remove a glass of Intent from an Ocean does quite nothing.

This is the reason Ruin didn't become less Ruinos with part of his power stolen

[Ironeyes]

On 6/26/2017 at 0:58 AM, Yata said:

I could not find the exact wording but it's a @Ironeyes 's WoB ( I hope he could link the right post with the proper wording) for now:

Regard your last post, with the exception of something cut off from the Shard (for example Ruin's stolen power) if a Shard manifest some part of himself (the Lerasium, the Mist, the Well,ecc...) those thing are still part of himself, he lose no power to making them. Sure upon use they will not be avaliable for a while but they will return to the Shard.

You may find a WoB about the Spren and how they were still part of Honor while he was alive, his power was not reduced from them.

The transcript of the signing is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o_-OadmbojDGZqFWls2meynCw4qLBWP-syEeSSgSRQ0/edit?usp=sharing

Actual text of the quote (spoilered)

Spoiler

Ironeyes: So harmonium, we have a working theory that the reason it's so volatile is because some of the subatomic particles are associated with Ruin and some of them are [of?] Preservation. Is that true?
A: Yeah, that's basically what's going on is that it's creating a very unstable metal. Now, it is in the nature of the Cosmere not a compound but an element. But, you could call it a subatomic particle sure. It's very volatile because it is in nature spiritually in contrast with itself. And so though it is a single element rather than a compound, the spiritual nature is not happy as it is, and you can set up in the physical realm, through reactivity things that would just rip it apart and really your energy is not, your energy in that is actually pulling from the Spiritual realm, and so that's why it can be so much more explosive than even the chemistry would account for.
Ironeyes: So it's not that the subatomic particles are invested, it's that they have a spiritual identity which causes them to...
A: Yes.
Ironeyes: So then it's not creating an oxide because after the spiritual energy goes away from the explosion[unintelligible] metal, right?
A: Right, and...
Ironeyes: So you can't find harmonium oxide in the water afterwards.
A: Right right right right. Because it's not, it's, yeah.  But you might be able to find something else, which is really relevant to the cosmere. And to Scadrial.
Ironeyes: So the core elements, the core particles, having extra repulsion causes them to have a nuclear potential.
A: I would not call it nuclear because it's not the same exact thing. But there is a cosmere equivalent, to... I mean, you could do nuclear power just the same in the cosmere, but since we have a third kind of state of matter, right, matter, energy, Investiture, you have a third axis that you know, you can release energy from matter, you can release investiture from matter, and things like that. So it's similar, but following its own rules that I have a little more... that are controlled by me, right. But are built on this idea. So once you add [unintelligible for a few syllables] that matter can now exist in this third state, you get all sorts of weird things, which one of the things that happens is, you can get an energy release in sort of the same way. A reaction, I'm not going to call it a nuclear reaction, but of the same vein.

 

[AlphaTests]

I don't think harmony can survive the destruction of his planet. This is just my opinion but I consider the shard and their planet relation as spren and human bond. The Shard has been part of their system for so long they are bonded now. Unable to leave.

[Calderis]

4 hours ago, AlphaTests said:

I don't think harmony can survive the destruction of his planet. This is just my opinion but I consider the shard and their planet relation as spren and human bond. The Shard has been part of their system for so long they are bonded now. Unable to leave.

I think the analogy is apt, and is why the Shard would survive. 

A spren only "dies" if the Oaths are broken. If the person they are bonded to dies, there are effects, but the Spren lives

http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=1088#44

Quote

QUESTION

After a spren has been bonded, what happens if the person it's bonded with dies?

BRANDON SANDERSON

It is an emotional event for the spren, but not a damaging one. As long as their oaths are unbroken.

ARGENT

Kind of like if a close friend dies?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Maybe a little more personal than that.

QUESTION

I guess Helaran was not bonded to a spren then?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Why do you say that

QUESTION

I saw that his Blade had a gemstone at the bottom, so that was a clue.

BRANDON SANDERSON

That is a very good clue.

TAGS

spren ,  shardblades ,  helaran