Can Shardblades Be Soulcasted

[ginsax he/him]

Like topic above, Can shard blades be soulcasted into anything? I was doing a reread of Oathbringer and got to the part where Shallan (Veil) was going through the Kholin mausoleum. Noticing the statues of dead kings, I started wondering about whether or not any of them were soulcasted with arms/armor.

Now I realize that it is incredibly unlikely that someone would want to destroy such a priceless weapon, but I'm still questioning the possibility of it.

 

What do you think?

[RShara she/her]

It would be extremely difficult, because the Shardblades are basically solidified investiture. The more Invested something is, the harder it is to affect with additional investiture. Soulcasting something so heavily Invested would require so much investiture as to be essentially impossible.

[Quantus he/him]

I think it depends on your definitions, but for the most part No.  It depend on whether you are talking about a normal shardblade as is getting passed around Roshar, vs an actual living Radiant blade.  In general Shardblades are going to be a lot harder to affect with ANY form of cosmere magic because they are already heavily Invested. 

But separately from that, Soulcasting an object involves connecting to it's cognitive aspect and convincing it to Change in that realm (which cascades out to the other two), and that is going to have a whole extra level of complication when you are talking about something that is or was Sentient Investiture in it's own right; such things are going to have an unusually strong sense of Self, and are going to be hard to convince otherwise, even "dead".

You'd probably have better luck Forging a Shardblade instead of Soulcasting it, but of course that's a whole other weirdness.

 

[RShara she/her]

Pretty sure Forging is going to take just as much energy as Soulcasting--i.e. so much that it's essentially impossible.

[Weltall]

4 hours ago, RShara said:

Pretty sure Forging is going to take just as much energy as Soulcasting--i.e. so much that it's essentially impossible.

Yeah, Brandon's even been asked this and got to use his favorite analogy, about turning lead into gold via a particle accelerator. This would apply to either turning a non-Invested sword into a Shardblade or doing anything to alter an existing one.

So for all practical intents and purposes you can't Soulcast Shardblades or alter them with Forgery. They're about the hardest thing to affect with Investiture that we know of other than Nightblood.

Edited September 4, 2018 by Weltall