Is it possible to imprison a Shard?

[Fanghur Rahl]

I was just wondering, would it be possible to trap a full Shard in a gem the way you can trap Spren and Splinters? Obviously this is purely academic, since I think it’s probably safe to say that even if it is possible it would probably require a perfect gemstone the size of a mountain or larger, but would it at least be possible in principle? Or are Shards sufficiently different from Spren and Splinters to make it impossible? Are there any WOBs relevant to this?

[Quantus]

Well, we know that one shard can trap another with a giant wad of Investiture, so I dont see why that investiture couldnt take the form of a God-Gem rather than a God-metal or Shardpool.  But I dont know that the Gem Structure would be adding much (aside from purely physical/practical effects like being arguably more mobile than a shardpool). 

[Fanghur Rahl]

I’m talking about ‘trapping’ in the sense that the Radiants trapped Ba-Ado-Mishram, not just completely nullifying their power by opposing it with its opposite. Preservation didn’t so-much ‘imprison’ Ruin as render him effectively impotent. It wasn’t a literal prison as I understand it.

[tmnsquirtle]

I don't see why not - gems store investiture, and can store a cognitive component. There was a WoB (or maybe a post on here) that said that shards are basically just big spren that I would link if I could find the blasted thing.

[Fanghur Rahl]

Just lure Odium to the vicinity of a white dwarf star; their cores are thought by some to be comprised largely of diamond (or something like it). lol.

[Quantus]

3 hours ago, Fanghur Rahl said:

I’m talking about ‘trapping’ in the sense that the Radiants trapped Ba-Ado-Mishram, not just completely nullifying their power by opposing it with its opposite. Preservation didn’t so-much ‘imprison’ Ruin as render him effectively impotent. It wasn’t a literal prison as I understand it.

Ah, gotcha.  Ok, assuming that their isnt some giant Oathpact Gem on Braize doing exactly that, it could work, though I see two possible issues:

1) quantitatively, we know per WOB that any given piece of physical matter can only hold so much investiture, which is why you cannot spike a full Shard out of it's host.

2) The Hexadieties are slightly different from Spren in that they do still retain their Native Physical Forms/Aspect (though it's almost entirely overshadowed by the massive ball of Investiture that they also are) which may prevent them from being subject to gem traps that (I think) work because Spren are pure Investiture that has gained Sentience, rather than the multi-realmic beings that sentient people are.    

 

Assuming #2 is not really an Issue, you are still talking about a huge gem, likely an astronomically huge gem, and it has to be molecularity perfect. Which is to say it's likely not going to exist in Nature. Another Shard could maybe make one?  But since they cant just blink one into existence without tying up their own investiture in the physical form, I think they'd have to go out and make a "Gem Factory" planet that was designed specifically to grow/fabricate such things.  I personally think there a Creator/Builder Shard out there, so this is as good a project as any for them to be investing in. 

 

 

[Ripheus23]

Trapping a spiritual crystal in a physical crystal, maybe? A Shard within a shard... Though the paradoxes or themes of such a description await a resolution as to why the Shards are called Shards and not Fragments or Aspects or whatever.

[tmnsquirtle]

21 hours ago, Fanghur Rahl said:

Just lure Odium to the vicinity of a white dwarf star; their cores are thought by some to be comprised largely of diamond (or something like it). lol.

 

19 hours ago, Quantus said:

Assuming #2 is not really an Issue, you are still talking about a huge gem, likely an astronomically huge gem, and it has to be molecularity perfect. Which is to say it's likely not going to exist in Nature. Another Shard could maybe make one?  But since they cant just blink one into existence without tying up their own investiture in the physical form, I think they'd have to go out and make a "Gem Factory" planet that was designed specifically to grow/fabricate such things.  I personally think there a Creator/Builder Shard out there, so this is as good a project as any for them to be investing in. 

 

 

If you combine these two ideas, you get the planet creators from hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. 

I wonder if Sanderson is a fan of Douglass Adams...

[Fanghur Rahl]

46 minutes ago, tmnsquirtle said:

 

If you combine these two ideas, you get the planet creators from hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. 

I wonder if Sanderson is a fan of Douglass Adams...

Oh geez. lol.

20 hours ago, Quantus said:

2) The Hexadieties are slightly different from Spren in that they do still retain their Native Physical Forms/Aspect (though it's almost entirely overshadowed by the massive ball of Investiture that they also are) which may prevent them from being subject to gem traps that (I think) work because Spren are pure Investiture that has gained Sentience, rather than the multi-realmic beings that sentient people are.    

I thought the Shards were purely post-physical beings? Aren’t their physical manifestations just avatars (in the correct usage of the term)? Didn’t Brandon flat-out say at one point that as soon as Dalinar absorbs enough of Honor’s essence that it vaporizes his body, he’ll truly be the next Honor (or Unity as the case may be)?

[CrazyRioter]

the body is "vaporized" but it still kind of exists. Like, when Ati and Leras die they leave corpses behind.

[Fanghur Rahl]

I thought of it more as being reformed upon the death of the Shard, not as some physical human body floating around in a giant network of Investiture.

[Calderis]

39 minutes ago, Fanghur Rahl said:

I thought of it more as being reformed upon the death of the Shard, not as some physical human body floating around in a giant network of Investiture.

It's both? The physical is subsumed in the Shard completely... But the Shard still has a physical aspect. 

This is why a Cognitive Shadow holding a Shard is severely limited as a Vessel. Without their own tie to the physical, they essentially lose access to that part of the Shard. 

Quote

The creature merely laughed louder. “You can barely control it,” Ruin said. “Even assuming it could harm me, you couldn’t accomplish such a task. Look at you, Kelsier! You haven’t form or shape. You’re not alive, you’re an idea. A memory of a man holding the power will never be as potent as a real one with ties to all three Realms.”

 

[Fanghur Rahl]

1 hour ago, Calderis said:

It's both? The physical is subsumed in the Shard completely... But the Shard still has a physical aspect. 

This is why a Cognitive Shadow holding a Shard is severely limited as a Vessel. Without their own tie to the physical, they essentially lose access to that part of the Shard. 

 

The problem with that is two-fold. For starters, we actually know for a fact that this isn’t quite true, since when Kelsier was briefly Preservation, he was in fact able to affect the physical realm, namely he tried to keep volcanoes from erupting, but Ruin was able to exert more power to thwart the attempt and force them back open. 

Secondly, the logic is faulty because a Shard (as I understand it anyway) is basically pure Investiture tending towards a particular intent, and Investiture is connected to all three realms. Ergo, if a cognitive shadow is able to ascend, it follows that it too should gain a connection to the physical realm as well, namely through the Investiture that effectively becomes its new body. And again, what we’ve witnessed supports the conclusion that they would at least have a ‘weak’ connection to the physical. Why should it matter where the mind controlling the Shard exists?

 

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

[Calderis]

24 minutes ago, Fanghur Rahl said:

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

I mean, yes there are definitely ways he coukd effect the physical, because the Realms are interconnected. Creating a change in one has reflections in the others. 

But if Kel could directly effect the Physical, why didn't he restore himself and make himself a body? Why wasn't that done automatically if other Vessels are put into what is basically the exact same state? Most of all why would ruin mock him for it? 

We love to blame this on Kel being better connected to Ruin than Preservation... But I don't think that's really it. Yes, he had a strong connection to Ruin, but he was made a CS by Preservation's pool. He should be literally composed of pure Preservation Investiture. If he still had a body he should have been "primed" to pick up the Shard. 

He knew that Sazed could have given him a body if he wished. Making himself a body should have been a simple thing, but he didn't. Without a tie to the physical, I don't think he was capable of doing it. To fix his problem, he'd have needed the issue fixed. 

[Quantus]

3 hours ago, Fanghur Rahl said:

Oh geez. lol.

I thought the Shards were purely post-physical beings? Aren’t their physical manifestations just avatars (in the correct usage of the term)? Didn’t Brandon flat-out say at one point that as soon as Dalinar absorbs enough of Honor’s essence that it vaporizes his body, he’ll truly be the next Honor (or Unity as the case may be)?

 Its vaporized in in that its destroyed, rather I think it more going into a state of Matter/Energy/Investiture Flux, shifting around between realm the way the rest of a resident shards Investiture tends to.

 

Quote

 

Yados

Does Sazed's biological body still exist somewhere? If so, does that body still possess Feruchemical abilities?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, it does exist, though kind of...blended-in, so to speak, as happened with the others when they Ascended. Yes, it still has his abilities, though they are kind of moot now.

source

 

[Fanghur Rahl]

3 hours ago, Calderis said:

I mean, yes there are definitely ways he coukd effect the physical, because the Realms are interconnected. Creating a change in one has reflections in the others. 

But if Kel could directly effect the Physical, why didn't he restore himself and make himself a body? Why wasn't that done automatically if other Vessels are put into what is basically the exact same state? Most of all why would ruin mock him for it? 

We love to blame this on Kel being better connected to Ruin than Preservation... But I don't think that's really it. Yes, he had a strong connection to Ruin, but he was made a CS by Preservation's pool. He should be literally composed of pure Preservation Investiture. If he still had a body he should have been "primed" to pick up the Shard. 

He knew that Sazed could have given him a body if he wished. Making himself a body should have been a simple thing, but he didn't. Without a tie to the physical, I don't think he was capable of doing it. To fix his problem, he'd have needed the issue fixed. 

My point is simply that it's clearly not true that a cognitive shadow in possession of a Shard is entirely confined to the Cognitive Realm and unable to either manifest in or causally affect the Physical Realm, since we saw Kelsier do both of those things in Secret History. It confused the heck out of me too, since first you have Ruin basically mocking and deriding him, claiming that since he had no body he can't affect the Physical Realm, and then literally a few paragraphs later we explicitly see Kelsier doing that exact thing, albeit far less effectively than Ruin could, but even so, holding back an erupting volcano is hardly a trivial endeavour. This is the kind of thing I meant in our discussion about the nature of the Realms last week, how Brandon sometimes describes them in internally inconsistent ways that make it difficult to pin down precisely what is and is not true about them. But anyway, like I said, going purely on the basis of what we know about Investiture, it doesn't make any real sense to say that an Ascended cognitive shadow would be unable to interact with the physical, since their Shard's Investiture has a physical aspect to it, and thus ipso facto so do they while they're holding the Shard.

That and quite honestly, I think it's probably fair to say that the Physical aspect of a human being compared to that of a Shard is probably comparable to a firecracker vs a hypernova, so I have a hard time imagining how a cognitive shadow could be hugely more handicapped than a living person would be. I mean don't get me wrong, if Brandon says it's so, then so be it. But I don't think it's particularly well thought out.

[Calderis]

8 minutes ago, Fanghur Rahl said:

That and quite honestly, I think it's probably fair to say that the Physical aspect of a human being compared to that of a Shard is probably comparable to a firecracker vs a hypernova, so I have a hard time imagining how a cognitive shadow could be hugely more handicapped than a living person would be. I mean don't get me wrong, if Brandon says it's so, then so be it. But I don't think it's particularly well thought out.

The issue is that without their own physical tie they don't have access to that "hypernova." As I said, yes they can still impact the physical through manipulation of the other realms... Like in the volcano thing. Manipulating the Spiritual and Cognitive environment in and around the Volcano, you can probably achieve the same results, but why bother with those if you could just do it in the physical to start with and avoid the Rube Goldberg machine? Kelsier couldn't best ruin through effort cause Ruin didn't have to deal with any of that, even removing experience. 

Kelsier was outright weaker than he should have been. It's stated plainly in the story. Rashek reshaped the planet like Sazed did, and he held a fraction of the power. Yes he was also unopposed, but I don't think that Kel could have manged that even if he weren't.