Azure's blade / "Compounding" Breath

[Benkinsky they/them]

Prologue: How I got to this idea.

Skip to Part 1 if you just want the speculations. Maybe you've read my post about Hacking Feruchemy and fueling it with the Investiture from other Key-based Magic Systems than Allomancy, namely AonDor. That got me thinking. Compounding, reduced to the Investitural workings, is: Powering End-Neutral Magic Release with another type of Investiture, an End-Positive one. Now, I've already speculated about the possibility of replacing Allomancy with AonDor as the End-Positive System, but what about the other half. And what other End-Neutral Magic do we know?
 

Quote

 

End-neutral Investiture

For an act of Investiture to be considered end-neutral, power is neither gained nor lost[47]. A practitioner manipulates power that already exists or power that comes from themselves.

Feruchemy is end-neutral, since the amount of Investiture remains constant. Awakening is also considered end-neutral, even though color is lost.[100]

 

Source: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Investiture#End-positive_Investiture

BioChromatic Breath

Like Feruchemy, BioChromatic Breath is End-neutral. No power is gained or lost, and both use the users Innate Investiture to do something rather than getting their fuel from elsewhere. However, that means that they are limited to using only the Innate Investiture.

I'm not sure if we can count Returned as End-neutral, a) since they're not a magic system and b ) since they're part of BioChromatic Breath as a system. However, they have to use up one Breath per Nalthian week to stay alive. That said, we have confirmation that this only requires the amount of Investiture that is One (1) Breath rather than specifically a breath, as seen with Vasher/Zahel.

Quote

Returned can receive more Breaths on top of their single divine Breath, stockpiling them to consume so that they don't need to receive one each week.^[24] Returned can also consume other types of Investiture, such as Stormlight, to feed their divine Breath. They must consume the same amount of Investiture per Nalthian week when doing so

Source: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Returned

Fueling Awakening with Stormlight

Returned can be categorized as Type I BioChromatic Entities. Sadly, we don't know if Vasher uses some kind of Conversion method, or if he is just able to consume Investiture in any form in the physical world to fuel his Awakening (aka his life). I write "in any form in the physical world" to make a distinction between something like the Dor or Preservation's Investiture and Stormlight or Breath. The former only enter the physical realm by activation and instantly take the form of whatever their key directs, while the other two are Investiture that is present without performing magic, sometimes even able to be stored in non-human carriers (see the broams on Roshar).

Where am I going with this?

If one Type of Awakening can be fueled by other Investiture, maybe others can too.

Stormlight is basically endless, or alteast its a refilling ressource. On something like Scadrial or Taldain, Vasher would have a very hard time getting Investiture to stay alive. (He'd have to become a Metalborn to access Preservation's Investiture, for example), so Roshar is a good choice.

Now, finally, what I'm trying to get at: I speculate that, with some methods that we don't yet know of or without, an Awakener holding Stormlight could use one or more Breaths in conjunction with their Stormlight to Awaken with a lot more power than they have Breaths.

Imagine sticking a Hose into a Water container. The water won't flow upwards by itself, but if you suck on the hose until water flows out of the top, you can stop sucking and it will flow by itself for a while because the stream is established. (Yes, that's a very basic breakdown of how physics work, shhh.) That's basically how I imagine Awakening with more Investiture could work.

 

I assume you'd need atleast one Breath to perform this. The Breath would act as a kind of spearhead, enabling you to perform the Awakening / speak your command. Only afterwards would you pull Investiture from the Broams around you (/ The Stormlight inside you / your connection to Preservation that is open because you were burning a metal at the time of speaking your command / etc etc etc) to fuel enough Investiture into the object to perform the Awakening.

First Question to the readers: Do you think I'm onto something? Do you think this could work?

 

Actual Theory

This one I'm throwing out there to present a theory of what this could enable. Lifeless are already super cheap breathwise, so Type III or IV Entities are what you might use this for. So here's my theory:

I think Azure's blade might was made with not just Breath.

It's similar to Nightblood, but "weaker" and probably with a different command. Azure hasn't made a name for herself on Roshar long before the siege of Kholinar so maybe it wasn't exactly Stormlight that was used to awaken her blade, but I assume we might see another (shard)world in the Nightblood novel. Whether it were the Scholars of Silverlight, experimenting to see what the least amount of Investiture needed to Awaken a Type IV BioChromatic Entity was, or users of a Magic System we haven't even seen yet - maybe Aether - I think Azure's Blade is more than just a Nightblood 2.0 with a better command and less Breath, but represents a new step in BioChromatic Scholarship: Entities that aren't only BioChromatic.

And who knows... Maybe Vasher is stockpiling insane amounts of Stormlight somewhere to use them for a massive Awakening somewhere/sometime in the future. Maybe he wants to Return someone (Shashara?) with it, or something like that.

Anyway, would love to hear others thoughts on this.

[Aspiring Writer]

On 10/5/2020 at 7:45 AM, Benkinsky said:

Prologue: How I got to this idea.

Skip to Part 1 if you just want the speculations. Maybe you've read my post about Hacking Feruchemy and fueling it with the Investiture from other Key-based Magic Systems than Allomancy, namely AonDor. That got me thinking. Compounding, reduced to the Investitural workings, is: Powering End-Neutral Magic Release with another type of Investiture, an End-Positive one. Now, I've already speculated about the possibility of replacing Allomancy with AonDor as the End-Positive System, but what about the other half. And what other End-Neutral Magic do we know?
 

Source: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Investiture#End-positive_Investiture

BioChromatic Breath

Like Feruchemy, BioChromatic Breath is End-neutral. No power is gained or lost, and both use the users Innate Investiture to do something rather than getting their fuel from elsewhere. However, that means that they are limited to using only the Innate Investiture.

I'm not sure if we can count Returned as End-neutral, a) since they're not a magic system and b ) since they're part of BioChromatic Breath as a system. However, they have to use up one Breath per Nalthian week to stay alive. That said, we have confirmation that this only requires the amount of Investiture that is One (1) Breath rather than specifically a breath, as seen with Vasher/Zahel.

Source: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Returned

Fueling Awakening with Stormlight

Returned can be categorized as Type I BioChromatic Entities. Sadly, we don't know if Vasher uses some kind of Conversion method, or if he is just able to consume Investiture in any form in the physical world to fuel his Awakening (aka his life). I write "in any form in the physical world" to make a distinction between something like the Dor or Preservation's Investiture and Stormlight or Breath. The former only enter the physical realm by activation and instantly take the form of whatever their key directs, while the other two are Investiture that is present without performing magic, sometimes even able to be stored in non-human carriers (see the broams on Roshar).

Where am I going with this?

If one Type of Awakening can be fueled by other Investiture, maybe others can too.

Stormlight is basically endless, or alteast its a refilling ressource. On something like Scadrial or Taldain, Vasher would have a very hard time getting Investiture to stay alive. (He'd have to become a Metalborn to access Preservation's Investiture, for example), so Roshar is a good choice.

Now, finally, what I'm trying to get at: I speculate that, with some methods that we don't yet know of or without, an Awakener holding Stormlight could use one or more Breaths in conjunction with their Stormlight to Awaken with a lot more power than they have Breaths.

Imagine sticking a Hose into a Water container. The water won't flow upwards by itself, but if you suck on the hose until water flows out of the top, you can stop sucking and it will flow by itself for a while because the stream is established. (Yes, that's a very basic breakdown of how physics work, shhh.) That's basically how I imagine Awakening with more Investiture could work.

 

I assume you'd need atleast one Breath to perform this. The Breath would act as a kind of spearhead, enabling you to perform the Awakening / speak your command. Only afterwards would you pull Investiture from the Broams around you (/ The Stormlight inside you / your connection to Preservation that is open because you were burning a metal at the time of speaking your command / etc etc etc) to fuel enough Investiture into the object to perform the Awakening.

First Question to the readers: Do you think I'm onto something? Do you think this could work?

 

Actual Theory

This one I'm throwing out there to present a theory of what this could enable. Lifeless are already super cheap breathwise, so Type III or IV Entities are what you might use this for. So here's my theory:

I think Azure's blade might was made with not just Breath.

It's similar to Nightblood, but "weaker" and probably with a different command. Azure hasn't made a name for herself on Roshar long before the siege of Kholinar so maybe it wasn't exactly Stormlight that was used to awaken her blade, but I assume we might see another (shard)world in the Nightblood novel. Whether it were the Scholars of Silverlight, experimenting to see what the least amount of Investiture needed to Awaken a Type IV BioChromatic Entity was, or users of a Magic System we haven't even seen yet - maybe Aether - I think Azure's Blade is more than just a Nightblood 2.0 with a better command and less Breath, but represents a new step in BioChromatic Scholarship: Entities that aren't only BioChromatic.

And who knows... Maybe Vasher is stockpiling insane amounts of Stormlight somewhere to use them for a massive Awakening somewhere/sometime in the future. Maybe he wants to Return someone (Shashara?) with it, or something like that.

Anyway, would love to hear others thoughts on this.

Okay, dude, I feel so bad for you, so I'm going to reply to this. So, that is an interesting theory, but why wouldn't the sword become like night blood, even if it used a different form of investiture? (P.S. You mentioned her blade being Nightblood 2.0, but everyone including Vivenna admitted it's weaker (She says it weaker than a shardblade, which are seen as weaker than Nightblood)) I guess we would have to see how awakening can work with other types of investiture, if that's even possible because breath awakens things because they are of endowment, so it might just be something we're assuming is possible but isn't, and if it is, I don't see why they re so different. Why does her blade not seem to absorb any type of investiture when in use? does it just not have to because it's weaker, or what? There is a lot of speculation we're doing with this, and while your theory is interesting, I think we need a little bit more information on either the blade or awakening with other types of investiture to say anything more/

[Koloss17 She/They]

I really liked how you presented this theory. It was very well made. I think it has some merit, as it could be made of another magic system, but it does seem to just do what a shardblade does but a tad weaker.

[Benkinsky they/them]

On 7.10.2020 at 6:34 AM, Aspiring Writer said:

So, that is an interesting theory, but why wouldn't the sword become like night blood, even if it used a different form of investiture? (P.S. You mentioned her blade being Nightblood 2.0, but everyone including Vivenna admitted it's weaker (She says it weaker than a shardblade, which are seen as weaker than Nightblood))

weaker doesn't necessarily mean worse. if you have a Nuke, a smaller blast radius means you can control its use better, its not just a downgrade. I think Nightblood would be similar. One of Nightblood's main "problems" is that the command is very unclear. The sword doesn't know what Evil is so it just destroys.

Quote

but why wouldn't the sword become like night blood, even if it used a different form of investiture?

I think you're confusing what I'm trying to get at. maybe I made it unclear. Those are two distinct parts

1. I think you could substitute the insane amount of Breaths needed for a creation like Nightblood with something else. This just makes it more possible to create something like it again.

2. Azure's blade was probably made with a different, and better command. You can give more complex commands if you use more Investiture, which is easier to get if it doesn't have to be breath.

On 7.10.2020 at 6:34 AM, Aspiring Writer said:

so it might just be something we're assuming is possible but isn't,

yes, that's why its a theory.

On 7.10.2020 at 6:34 AM, Aspiring Writer said:

I think we need a little bit more information on either the blade or awakening with other types of investiture to say anything more/

yeah, probably. I just wanted to put my thoughts somewhere

[RShara she/her]

Even Hoid hasn't figured out how to Awaken with Stormlight instead of Breath, so I don't think that Yesteel and Vivenna would have figured it out yet. Vasher definitely hasn't. Also, I think Endowment would notice if another Shard is interfering on her world, and her Letter inferrs that it has not happened.

[Aspiring Writer]

8 hours ago, RShara said:

Even Hoid hasn't figured out how to Awaken with Stormlight instead of Breath, so I don't think that Yesteel and Vivenna would have figured it out yet. Vasher definitely hasn't. Also, I think Endowment would notice if another Shard is interfering on her world, and her Letter inferrs that it has not happened.

It could've been brought there from off-world by a world hopper like Hoid, though I admit that's very unlikely seeing as she noticed even Hoid and the amount of investiture needed to do this would probably be hard to bring to Nathline and very noticeable to Endowment.