Awakening people

[Timothy]

Passing a breath onto someone is done with a very specific command, "My life to yours, my Breath become yours.", which is a biochromatic command/awakening. Could this mean that perhaps it would be possible to awaken people in a similar way with other commands? This could potentially have dark application if proven possible.

Could what Vasher does when giving so many breaths to someone with the intent of inmovilizing them be some sort of proto awakening of this sort?

[+Invocation]

When you're Awakening something, you're stuffing a soul into it and it's doing what you made that soul want to do. The breaths form the soul, there. Each person has their own soul already, so no, you cannot Awaken a living human being. The reason the immobilization happens is that's a lot of Investiture to take in all at once and it brings a whole host of new sensations with it (heightened senses, lifesense, and a feeling of health) that most people don't know how to deal with because it all hits you like a brick to the face.

[Timothy]

Yeah I know that the inmovilization is due to the breath's they suddenly get, but Vasher's intent while doing that and his status as a returned with lots of breath might have helped too.

[Weltall]

Nah, it's the exact same effect that Vivenna experiences early in the book and Brandon explicitly parallels the two since the one is meant to foreshadow the other. It's actually something he borrowed from Mythwalker, the unfinished book that's essentially Warbreaker Prime with a dash of Way of Kings and Mistborn for good measure. There's no reason to think that Vasher did anything different, especially since we see him performing the Command. Also, he doesn't have a lot of Breath at that point, just fifty or so.

Now, we know it's possible to perform some kinds of Awakening on yourself since Vasher tells Denth he knows Commands that could 'make him forget' and we see him do this with the priest's daughter earlier in the book. She must have been doing it on herself because Vasher tells her words to repeat back to him and tells her she has to mean them when she says them, obviously a Command. Then Vivenna sees her aura flicker slightly as she's speaking, so it looks like she used a tiny bit of her own innate Breath in the process. There is however no indication that you can perform Awakening on someone else.

Edited January 29, 2019 by Weltall