skaa

Welcome to the 17th Shard! My Top 5 changes frequently. Right now it's these guys: Shai Vasher Kelsier Wayne Pattern I like both problem-solvers and characters who make me laugh. Hoid and Lift are honorable mentions. What kinds of characters do you like, @Birdie?

Yet we have Feruchemy, which existed long before Sazed, long before even Rashek. Feruchemy is another combination of Ruin and Preservation's power. Just like Harmony. Just like harmonium. And forgive me, but Preservation didn't "try with all its force to stay away from Ruin". In fact, he did the opposite. His sacrificed his own mind to imprison Ruin in the Well of Ascension. Here's a telling excerpt from HoA: Balance. Harmony. Notice how strangely Ruin worded that. "Balance imprisoned me" implied that balance was the cause of his imprisonment, but "to ...lock it away, to leave me equal with him again" implied that balance was the result of his imprisonment. It seems to me that he was talking about two different things. I think Ruin's imprisonment really was caused by something related to balance. It might be related to the origin of Feruchemy. Or it might be related to the origin of harmonium. It could even be both. Again, speculation is all we can do right now, but I'm just saying we still can't rule out the idea that harmonium is pre-Sazed.

I really wish we had a canon term for "the Spiritual relationship between one part of a Spiritweb and another part of the same Spiritweb", so that I wouldn't have had to invent the term "Internal Connection", as it forced me to give another name ("External Connection") to a concept that already has a canon term ("Connection"). *sigh* Here is another reason why I regret having to invent "Internal Connection". You accuse me of saying Feruchemical Duralumin can manipulate Internal Connections when I said the exact opposite in Part I: In Part III, I discuss the possibility of Religious Connection (an External Connection) acting like an Internal Connection when mixed with Spiritual damage. I was proposing that Religious Connection is an exception to the rule, a sort of bridge between the External and the Internal for spiritually damaged people (e.g. those with Hemalurgic spikes). At least, that's how I interpret the WoBs about Spook and Wax's interactions with their gods. That's how Connectors can use Religious Connection for the purpose I described in Part IV. I think I also need to clarify that not all Connections between a god and a person is necessarily religious in nature. Kelsier's many Connections to Ruin doesn't mean Kelsier worshiped the Shard (he obviously didn't). Preservation has Connections to all Allomancers (and indeed to all Scadrians, though to a lesser extent), but those Connections aren't religious. The only spiked people who actually worshiped Preservation were the kandra, who practiced the old Terris religion: Look back to the scene where TenSoon was forcing himself to not kill Sazed and to pull his spikes free: That mirrored the scene where Spook was being tempted to kill Beldre. We now know that during that event Kelsier was using his (religious) Connection with Spook, who ended up pulling his spike free and saving the city. In the case of the kandra, Vin as Preservation also succeeded in influencing the kandra: What's important to remember here is that Preservation normally can't influence people with damaged souls the way Ruin and Cognitive Shadows can. Leras said it himself: This was how Kelsier was able to whisper to madmen, and how he got to tell Vin not to approach Hoid. When Kelsier Ascended, he stopped being able to do this: Notice also what Kelsier had to do in order to communicate with Spook: As you can see, Kelsier had to draw back the power of Preservation and expose his own soul before he could affect Spook the way he did. Why? Because Spook did not worship Preservation. Spook worshiped Kelsier. The kandra, however, worshiped Preservation. Their faith somehow let Vin (as Preservation) into their souls in a way she wouldn't be able to do with other beings. (Except Elend, though that's another issue and is outside the scope of this discussion.)

That is an interesting idea. It will require Excisors to grant Allomantic powers as well just for Compounding to occur, so I'm not sure if I'm going to espouse that idea, but it might be a more acceptable option for those who don't think a Soulbearer can store his own piece of soul directly if it's sealed in a spike. Anyway, guys, Pagerunner is probably right about Edwarn, so I'm abandoning my idea that the Set is using Religious Connection to siphon Health from people. I have updated Part III accordingly.

Yeah, that wasn't the part I was questioning. I was questioning the part where you conclude harmonium cannot be pre-Sazed because it's an element, That simply doesn't follow. It can be an element and pre-Sazed.

Thanks! I'll try to answer your issues one by one Yeah, one can choose to believe that Allik wasn't being sarcastic or sycophantic or deceptive or imprecise when he said Wax "knew much about this". But frankly, Wax knew not a rusting bit about Southern medallions for certain at that point. For all we know, he was only mostly right, and Allik wasn't in the mood to nitpick. By the way, Allik never says anything about brass; all he says is that the other ring "grants the warmth". So yeah he was being very ambiguous. The main reason why I believe they aren't tapping Investiture is that Spiritual DNA is important in Investiture. If you don't have the right Investiture to tap a Feruchemical Attribute, then you can't tap it. Period. Even if we say, for example, that the memory coin Hoid gave Wax contains the Investitures of both Copper Feruchemy (to tap the memory) and Nicrosil Feruchemy (to tap the Investiture of Copper Feruchemy), we still need to explain how someone who doesn't have a pre-existing Investiture of Nicrosil Feruchemy can tap the Investiture of Nicrosil Feruchemy in that coin. And since the Southerners apparently found a way of using a nicrosilmind without first being a Soulbearer, then they wouldn't need to put Nicrosil Feruchemy in the coin, would they? They just needed to put Copper Feruchemy in there, along with a piece of copper containing the memory. But that doesn't mean Wax was Feruchemically tapping the Investiture of Copper Feruchemy, because he can't; he's not a Soulbearer. Something else was happening there aside from him tapping Investiture. Does that make things clearer? I am okay with it not being very convincing-- again, I'd be surprised if I actually got all these correct-- but you're forgetting about the WoB about Wax. The question in that WoB was how Harmony can communicate with Wax. Brandon already gave the obvious answer (Harmony had both Ruin and Preservation and so could speak to spiked people and listen to them at the same time) but he didn't stop there; he went on to add that bit about Wax's religious connection to Harmony. So that, in addition to Spooks case, made it clear to me that in Brandon's mind religious connection is Realmatically important. Again, I feel that you missed an important bit. I didn't start with Templeton. I started with Edwarn's passing remark that he could make someone else weak while he gains the benefit. Given that he said this in the context of his Hemalurgic "boons" (which incidentally included Gold Feruchemy), he was obviously talking about some bizarre process where he's making someone else suffer what he ought to be suffering in relation to his boons. That implies a special Connection between him and someone else, a Connection that does not only benefit him but obviously affects someone else's Spiritweb (in a negative way). This was exactly the sort of solution we needed when creating multi-powered medallions: a way for one soul to Connect with another in a way that mimics Internal Connection, in order to solve the soul interference problem. Given the WoB that Duralumin Feruchemy is involved in medallion creation, it's no surprise that I latched onto that idea. In order to make a guess as to what kind of Connection that is, I needed to see what the Set and the Southerners had in common. What special Connection would both groups be able to create? That's when I remembered that both groups are religiously motivated, and that we've seen evidence of religious connections doing weird things before. It's not a solid thing, but it led to progress in my speculation, so that was good enough for me. Yeah, as you can tell, I tried to make it as close to "normal" as possible (i.e. the piece of soul is still inside him, and it actually came from him), but obviously a Feruchemist storing a Hemalurgic charge is not something we've ever seen before (though of course, we haven't even met a Soulbearer Ferring before). This is just another speculative part of the theory that you don't really need to accept. The only reason I made this speculation is that if an "unsealed metalmind" really is forming a hybrid being of itself and its user (as was my suspicion from the start), then that sounds eerily like Hemalurgy. It was this mental connection that made me speculate that unsealed metalminds contain Hemalurgic charges. Anyway, I've tried describing what led me to some of the speculations I've made. Feel free to ask more questions, keeping in mind that I claim no certainty about any of this craziness. @Argent, given that I needed to explain so many weird things about the medallions (see the list in the Introduction section), I am very happy I ended up with just four parts. Just take a look at what I had to deal with: I had to explain what Excisors are. I had to show how someone could access a metalmind without being a Feruchemist. I had to somehow involve Duralumin Feruchemy in medallion-creation. (Heck, I was starting to panic when I developed my Excisor theory without even using Duralumin!) I had to describe a hack for "fooling the magic system into thinking that you have the right sDNA." My theory must allow medallions to be used by non-Scadrians. I had to explain why medallions interfered with each other. Why is making three-powered medallions so rusting hard? And what, you were expecting something that's just a tiny bit "not very linear"?! You gotta be kidding me! But seriously, just look at that list and tell me again how convoluted you think my speculations are.

Your Spiritweb, as I said in Part I, is the collection of all your Internal Connections (the Connections of everything that is part of you). Even if those Connections change, as they obviously do, the thing that is the collection of your Internal Connections is still the collection of your Internal Connections. In other words, your Spiritweb is still your Spiritweb no matter how much your aspects have changed. Another point I'd like to make is that, as time does not exist in the Spiritual Realm, your Spiritweb is not just a collection of your Internal Connections now, but also of all the Internal Connections you ever had and will have (which is why atium and malatium works by peering at Spiritual aspects). That is in fact a classic response to the Ship of Theseus: Identity must be seen as a four-dimensional thing that contains all the temporal changes to it, so the Ship of Theseus is still the Ship of Theseus after all of its parts have been replaced one by one. I understand that Brandon said that your spiritual aspect can change and that must have made you think my conclusion was wrong. What I'm saying is that just because some parts of your spiritual aspect change at some point in time doesn't mean the whole four-dimensional thing has suddenly been replaced by something else. The whole remains even when the parts change.

Actually, I know quite well what the difference is between "unkeyed metalmind" (a term first used by Marasi, as I said) and "unsealed metalmind". You might want to re-read the sentence you quoted. What I did not know, though, was that Brandon gave us the term unsealed metalmind. Or maybe I just forgot. Thanks, anyway! Now that I know the origin of the term, I still don't like it very much. It's still far too easy for a newbie to mistake "unsealed metalmind" for "unkeyed metalmind", which is what I meant when I said it was confusing. In fact, I think it would make my posts above a bit less readable if I replaced the instances of "excised metalmind" with "unsealed metalmind". But hey, the boss has spoken. Unsealed it is.

Yeah, the idea of harnessing religious belief to gain magical benefits is indeed something that can be explored more in a general cosmere theory. Unfortunately I feel that I really need a break right now so I won't attempt that any time soon. Feel free to take a stab at it if you wish, though! And thanks for the kind words!

Thanks for the insightful response, @8bitBob! I could've sworn I mentioned the Bands in a previous draft, but apparently I messed up and accidentally deleted something. Yes, the Bands most likely includes Nicrosil Feruchemy as part of the package. I wasn't saying that it's impossible to create a medallion containing Nicrosil Feruchemy (in fact, that's exactly what I think Excisors are). I was just saying that if a medallion does not contain a Nicrosil Feruchemy nicrosilmind, the user obviously can't tap Investiture. I'll edit my Introduction section to make that clear.

Part IV: Soul Medallions Given everything I've discussed above, assuming my speculations are accurate then we can already build a general Excisor theory that covers all the bases. The Excisor Since an excised nicrosilmind is basically one that contains a Hemalurgically-ripped piece of a Feruchemist's soul, an Excisor must be something that facilitates the creation of such a thing. Here are some things it might do: It must grant Nicrosil Feruchemy in order to let someone store a Hemalurgic charge. It might grant Gold Feruchemy and a lot of stored Health, for healing Hemalurgic damage. Though since an alternative Hemalurgic microsystem would allow for non-fatal stabbing, this might not be necessary. The user could always borrow a health medallion afterwards. It might have empty spikes of various metals incorporated into it for Excising specific powers. Perhaps the spikes are procured separately, but having spikes attached (perhaps chained?) to the Excisor would definitely add to its mysterious nature. It might grant other powers that could be handy for the task. I don't think storing Identity is all that useful for a Southern medallion, but hey why not? Since it grants powers, an Excisor must either be a set of Hemalurgic spikes containing those powers or it is itself a set of excised nicrosilminds. I am betting on the latter, because the Sovereign could obviously create multi-powered excised metalminds himself and there would be no point in making his followers stab themselves more than is necessary. The Microsystem In Part II, I speculated that there is another body part that like the heart can act as a source of Hemalurgic charges. Where is this so-called bindpoint microsystem alternative? Frankly, we don't have any strong clues, and it really wouldn't matter to me which one Brandon chose, but in the spirit of sportsmanship I will make a random guess and say that the hands are a bindpoint microsystem. I am basing this on the fact that hand acupuncture is popular in Korea, a place very close to Brandon's heart. The Religious Connection We established in Part III that the Connection formed by religious devotion is strong enough to overcome soul interference. So in order to create multi-powered medallions, one must make the piece of soul in one nicrosilmind "worship" the piece of soul in the other nicrosilmind. This is done by using Duralumin Feruchemy to store a Southern commoner's religious devotion to the Metalborn owner of the first nicrosilmind and using that Connection on the Metalborn owner of the second nicrosilmind. That's how to make two-powered medallions. The problem when creating a three-powered nicrosilmind has to do with balancing Connection strength: A third Metalborn will have to be equally Connected religiously to both the first and second Metalborns. The religious devotion must be completely balanced in order for one "god" to not outdo the other "god". Messing up this balance will cause one or two of the three nicrosilminds to disconnect from the user. This is why three-powered nicrosilminds are very rare, and why four-powered nicrosilminds are unheard of: nobody could be equally religiously devoted to three gods at once. The Process Here is how you create a single-powered medallion: Be a Ferring. Wear an empty medallion containing a nicrosil ring and another portion composed of your metal. Fill the non-nicrosil portion of the medallion (unless you are a Soulbearer, in which case fill the other nicrosil portion). Wear an Excisor. Even if you are already a Soulbearer, you might want to avail of the Excisor's other powers if any. Using a spike of the proper composition, stab the bindpoint on your hand corresponding to your Feruchemical power but don't remove the spike yet. Using the Nicrosil Feruchemy granted by the Excisor, move the piece of excised soul from the spike into the medallion's nicrosil ring. Remove the spike. Heal yourself with Gold Feruchemy (hopefully your Excisor has one). Remove the Excisor. And here's how you create a two-powered medallion: Be a Ferring (or ensure that the other Metalborn is a Ferring). If you are not a Connector, wear a Connection medallion created using the steps above. Find a commoner who worships you, then store his religious Connection in a duraluminmind. Tap this religious Connection and Connect it to the other Metalborn. He should now have religious devotion to you. Wear an empty medallion containing two nicrosil rings, your metal, and the other Metalborn's metal if he is a Ferring. Fill your designated metal. Wear an Excisor. The Connection medallion can stay because its creator most probably worships the creator of the Excisor (the Sovereign). Using a spike of the proper composition, stab the bindpoint on your hand corresponding to your power but don't remove the spike yet. Using the Nicrosil Feruchemy granted by the Excisor, move the piece of excised soul from the spike into the medallion's inner nicrosil ring. Remove the spike. Heal yourself with Gold Feruchemy (hopefully your Excisor has one). Remove the Excisor and hand it and the medallion to the other Metalborn. The other Metalborn performs Steps 6-11 for his part of the medallion. And there you have it! To be quite honest, I would be very surprised if all my speculations above turn out to be correct. There are in fact a few questions lefts unanswered: Why can't the Set figure out how to refill the Heat medallions? Do those medallions not have the "storing" part of a Firesoul's Investiture? Can such a trick be done using Hemalurgy? Do the medallions have Identity? I don't see a need for the Identity-storing trick when it comes to Southern medallions, but at the same time I feel it's a bit of a waste to discard that concept, so there's a sense that I might be missing something. Anyway, even if I do end up mostly wrong, I hope I have sparked other theorists' imagination. Who knows? Maybe my musings would nudge someone else towards the actual correct answers.

Part III: Soul Interference There is still one problem: We know that medallions interfere with each other, but we don't know why. Why would the process described above result in such an interference? After all, Hemalurgists usually stick multiple spikes into themselves, each spike containing pieces of souls from different people, and yet Hemalurgists can use the powers in all of their spikes. If unsealed metalminds work by harnessing pieces of souls ripped out by Hemalurgy, why would such pieces of souls interfere in nicrosilminds but not in spikes? And how did the Southerners overcome this interference in their two-powered medallions? First of all, soul interference is indeed a thing. As Brandon has said several times (for example here), Investiture resists Investiture. He even uses the term "soul interference" here in relation to spikes embedded in the soul (though in the context of the soul interfering with Iron and Steel Allomancy). So it stands to reason that the soul pieces in multiple Hemalurgic spikes do interfere with one another, but this interference is mitigated somehow. I think that when a Hemalurgist has at least two spikes, the interference between the Hemalurgic charges is counteracted by the Internal Connections created by Ruin's Investiture between the Hemalurgist's blood and the metal spikes. Nonetheless, soul interference is there and it does take a toll on the Hemalurgist's Spiritweb. This is why Steel Inquisitors have such fragile Spiritwebs. Not only is a Steel Inquisitor damaged at his affected bindpoints, his whole Spiritweb suffers from internal forces pulling it apart because of soul interference. Medallions on the other hand do not involve blood so the presence of a second medallion simply results in the Internal disconnection of the first. Note that Edwarn's spikes did not seem to interfere with medallions, but that's probably because he got the spikes first and those spikes are already embedded into the Spiritweb. I predict that if you wore a medallion and then stabbed yourself with a Hemalurgic spike, the medallion would stop working; you'd have to remove the medallion and wear it again to reset the Connection. Multi-powered Medallions So why do two-powered and three-powered medallions created from multiple Metalborn exist? Allik implies that it took Southern Scadrians a long time to figure out how to make those and that three-powered medallions are very rare. If you've been paying attention to Part II, you already know one big motivation for creating such medallions: If an unsealed metalmind has to contain Feruchemical sDNA for it to initiate a Feruchemical Tunnel with a non-Feruchemist, then single-powered medallions can only have Feruchemical powers. You can't have single-powered medallions that grant Allomancy. So in order to have Allomantic medallions, you need to figure out how make at least two-powered medallions, with one nicrosilmind containing a Feruchemical power and another containing an Allomantic power. Now, the problem of soul interference can only be solved if you find a way for two pieces of souls from two different people to see themselves as compatible. Unlike unkeyed metalminds, it would take more than just being Identity-less for this to work because even without Identity, a small twisted piece of soul will not accept another small twisted piece of soul as its owner. But if a Connection of ownership cannot exist, perhaps another kind of Connection can. (Update: The original version of this post contained a section here that I no longer believe is accurate. I am keeping it here in spoiler tags so that people can see the development of my ideas.) Religious Connection Here is an excerpt for Secret History and a couple of WoBs that show people being especially Connected by a combination of a damaged Spiritweb and religious devotion: We know that Spook already had his Spiritweb damaged both by being a Savant and having a spike. That last WoB is about Wax, whose religious earring pierced his soul whenever he prayed to Harmony. As we can see, there is something special about the Connection between a person and his god. Religious devotion appears to be a much stronger Connection than even familial ties (something that might puzzle atheists and agnostics, but would make perfect sense to any religious person). What should just be an External Connection somehow behaves like an Internal Connection in the right circumstances, as if a person becomes a part of his god (at least temporarily). The Southern Metalborn, who are worshiped by their people, would have no problem obtaining Religious Connections. I propose that they use Religious Connection to connect their soul to another Metalborn's soul when creating two-powered medallions in order to counteract the effects of soul interference. (Update: I discuss how Vin as Preservation used Religious Connection to influence the kandra here.)

Part II: Soul Excision Two years ago I wrote a theory about how acupuncture can be used to safely transfer Feruchemical Attributes in a Hemalurgic way. That theory was inspired by this particular WoB: I don't want to debate about the merits of my old theory here, but I have now thought of another possible connection between Hemalurgy and acupuncture. Hemalurgy and Spiritweb Microsystems From the above WoB ("It depends on where in the heart..."), it seems that the heart has multiple bindpoints. This means that when you want to Hemalurgically steal something (lets call it Attribute X), you need to know where in the heart the bindpoint for Attribute X is for you to steal it. But at the same time, when you place the Attribute X-charged spike onto the intended recipient you almost never place it in the heart (with a few exceptions). The question is: Why does Attribute X have a bindpoint in the heart and a bindpoint somewhere else? And why does the heart contain bindpoints for all attributes? In the meridian system (which acupuncture is based on), there are certain special body parts that somehow have acupuncture points representing other body parts. This web page calls such a special body part a "microsystem" that mirrors the whole body. I don't know if "microsystem" really is the accepted English translation of the Chinese concept, but I have certainly encountered the concept itself several times in the past. For example, as a kid I met a practitioner of foot reflexology who showed me a diagram of the different pressure points in the feet, each labeled based on which body organs you can stimulate through them. Depending on which Asian country you are in, alternative medicine practitioners make use of other "microsystems"-- the ears, the hands, the wrists, the scalp, the tongue, the abdomen-- all of these supposedly contain acupoints for other body parts. Even Western alternative medicine has its own counterpart for this called iridology: the belief that a wide variety of health problems can be diagnosed just by examining your iris. (Disclaimer: I don't believe the meridian system, and I'm certainly not an expert. I'm just speculating on a possible real life inspiration for Hemalurgy.) Given this, I think it's obvious that the heart is a microsystem of the Spiritweb, containing Hemalurgic bindpoints to many other places in one's soul. What I'd like to propose is threefold: One can only steal attributes Hemalurgically through a Spiritweb microsystem. There is more than one Spiritweb microsystem. It's not just the heart. There is a Spiritweb microsystem that can be used without killing the person. It's easy to imagine why the heart would be the preferred microsystem: Hemalurgy requires blood to create Internal Connections, and the heart is the center of the circulatory system. It's possible that using any other Spiritweb microsystem would only steal a smaller piece of soul and create a weaker Connection, leading to a much faster decay rate. But what if you don't really want to store a piece of soul in a spike for Hemalurgic use anyway? What if, say, you just want to excise a smaller piece of soul in a non-fatal manner and store it somewhere non-Hemalurgic, say, a nicrosilmind? Hemalurgy and Nicrosil Feruchemy As we all know, when a Hemalurgist spikes someone through the heart and removes the spike, a piece of soul is forcibly ripped out. On several occasions (e.g. in this annotation), Brandon describes this piece of ripped-out soul as a "twisted" power. On the other hand, there is no indication that a typical Feruchemical charge (which is also a piece of a person) is similarly twisted. I think this is because Hemalurgy does not sever souls cleanly, while Feruchemy does. Imagine a Hemalurgic charge as a frayed uneven piece of cloth aggressively torn from a larger whole and a Feruchemical charge as one sheared neatly off. Basically, Feruchemy can create self-contained Attributes, while Hemalurgy cannot. This is why when a Feruchemical Tunnel is created (as described in Part I), the Feruchemist still needs to tap the Attribute deliberately and consciously; because the Attribute sees itself as a whole, it doesn't automatically jump into the Feruchemist's Spiritweb. On the other hand, a Hemalurgic charge forms an Internal Connection the moment it penetrates the Spiritweb barrier; the twisted piece of soul sees itself as incomplete and wishes to rectify that situation. So what does this have to do with Nicrosil Feruchemy and unsealed metalminds? Imagine a Soulbearer storing a piece of a Hemalurgic charge in a nicrosilmind. It should be possible, for soul is Investiture. To avoid any Identity issues, let's say the piece of soul in the Hemalurgic spike was taken from the Soulbearer himself. Such a nicrosilmind would have two notable characteristics: The Hemalurgic charge inside should no longer be reliant on blood and should not decay, because Feruchemy prevents that. Since the charge is still a twisted piece of ripped-out soul, it would not consider itself as complete, and would try to Internally Connect to a person as soon as it finds an opportunity. This opportunity comes when a Feruchemical Tunnel is formed between the nicrosilmind and another person (who could be any person). As discussed in Part I, the Feruchemical Tunnel forms when a person touches a metalmind knowing that it is a metalmind and with Feruchemical Investiture present. In this case, Feruchemical Investiture does not need to be pre-existing in the person if the nicrosilmind already contains Feruchemical Investiture (which would be the case if the Hemalurgic charge came from a Feruchemist). I will repeat something I said in the Introduction: You cannot Feruchemically tap Investiture without Nicrosil Feruchemy. Even after a Feruchemical Tunnel is created, even if the unsealed nicrosilmind was created without Identity, if neither the user or the metalmind contains Nicrosil Feruchemy sDNA then no Feruchemical tapping of Investiture may occur. But something else does occur. The soul inside the nicrosilmind automatically creates an Internal Connection with the person. This is not the same as Feruchemical tapping because the piece of soul is not removed from the nicrosilmind. But for the duration of the Feruchemical Tunnel's existence there exists a being that is both a metalmind and a human person, and this hybrid being has Spiritual DNA that the human part did not originally have. And that's one way to "hack the magic and make it think you have the Spiritual DNA that you don’t actually have."

Part I: Soul Connection There's an old philosophical problem: How can you say that something is part of you? How do you differentiate your Self from your environment? It's an interesting question, popularly exemplified by the Theseus's Paradox (I won't discuss it here, but go read on it if you haven't yet), which Brandon conveniently resolves in his fictional universe using his concept of the Spiritweb. Basically, while everything in the cosmere is connected in some way to everything else in the Spiritual Realm, there is still a concept of "self" or "soul", defined by the Spiritweb. Your Spiritweb can be thought of as all the Spiritual Connections between the things that are considered part of your Identity. This includes Connections to your Physical parts, Cognitive parts, and Spiritual parts. These Connections that make up a person's Spiritweb are what I call his Internal Connections. All other Connections to that person would be what I call External Connections. Basically anything with an Internal Connection to you is part of your Spiritweb, and is therefore part of your Identity. If something is only Connected to you Externally, then it's not really part of you. There is also the concepts of Connection strength, direction, and duration, which we'll get back to later. One might wonder if Connectors (Duralumin Feruchemists) can use their power to manipulate the Internal Connections of Spiritwebs, but I think that's too overpowered. It's likely that Connectors can only manipulate External Connections. This concept of Internal and External Connections is an important issue with regards to the cosmere-wide concept of Investiture, because there are ways to integrate a Shard's Investiture into a person's soul. It is said that the soul itself is made of Investiture, so if a Shard's Investiture could somehow find its way through openings or cracks in a person's soul, it could incorporate itself into the Spiritweb, being Internally Connected to it. This is why a Nicrosil Feruchemist, someone who can put his own Investiture inside a piece of nicrosil, is called a Soulbearer, because that Investiture is part of his soul. The Connections of Hemalurgy What I would like to focus on now is this requirement for a soul to have cracks for some types of Investiture to become part of it. This is obviously not ideal, because you are requiring a person to be harmed before Investing him. This harm is most apparent in Hemalurgy, which violently Invests into a person's Spiritweb a twisted piece of soul that itself was violently ripped away from another person. One major limitation of Hemalurgy is that unless the metallic spike that holds this piece of soul remains inside a person or is covered in fresh blood, it slowly decays. I believe this is because Ruin's Investiture creates a strong Internal Connection between metal and a piece of soul when blood is present. This Internal Connection is stronger than the Internal Connection between the targeted piece of soul and the rest of the damaged Spiritweb, which is why the piece of soul sticks to the metal when the spike is pulled free. But without blood, the Internal Connection of Hemalurgy weakens and the severed piece of soul, Internally disconnected to everything, is slowly released "back to the cosmere" as Harmony would say. This is what causes Hemalurgic decay. The Connections of Feruchemy What's interesting is that Feruchemy has no such limitations. Not only does Feruchemical charges not decay the way Hemalurgic charges do, Feruchemical tapping doesn't even seem to require harming the soul. Why is it different? I theorize that the combined power of Ruin and Preservation allows Feruchemy to safely widen the tiny openings located at bindpoints of the soul to allow certain Internal Connections to be created. This widening of Spiritweb openings happens for both the soul of the Feruchemist and the soul of its target vessel (usually some form of metal). My basis for this is this bit from Secret History: As we learned in the first Mistborn trilogy (and in this WoB), Preservation can hear the thoughts of all people (but cannot be heard), while Ruin can only speak to mentally unstable people or people with spikes. I theorize that Preservation has access to all Spiritweb bindpoints (including the bindpoints related to the person's Cognitive parts) but can only create Internal Connections that go one way from the person to the Shard. Ruin, on the other hand, can only access cracked bindpoints (e.g. ones Connected to damaged Cognitive parts) and can only create one-way Internal Connections from him to the person. On the other hand, Ruin can widen the cracked bindpoints that he uses in order to make his Connections stronger, while Preservation cannot. This is why Preservation relies on Snapping; He needs a large enough opening to insert the huge amounts of Investiture involved in Allomancy even in people already born Allomancers, so those Allomancers have to experience trauma first. Feruchemy, being a combination of the Intents of Ruin and Preservation, has access to all bindpoints (or at least the bindpoints required by the specific type of Feruchemy) as well as the ability to widen the bindpoint openings without the need of cracking them first. Feruchemy also creates Internal Connections that go either direction to or from a piece of metal, letting things in or out. This is probably why we never hear of Feruchemists Snapping; their Investiture can widen bindpoint openings on its own. (As an aside, Harmony should be able to widen cracks in the soul by himself, which is probably why the Snapping threshold is now much lower. I can imagine Sazed's black mist Snapping Allomancers during slightly uncomfortable bar mitzvah-like rituals. Anyway...) One limitation of Feruchemy is that before it widens the necessary bindpoint opening, it requires physical contact with the target (an External Connection in the Physical Realm?) as well as a mental identification of the metal as a metalmind (an External Connection in the Cognitive Realm?). Whatever these requirements mean, once they are met the soul of the Feruchemist as well as the soul of the target opens up to each other, creating a sort of two-way Spiritual tunnel. Let's call it a Feruchemical Tunnel. This Feruchemical Tunnel ceases to exist when the two requirements are no longer met. There is, of course, one more requirement related specifically to tapping the Attribute in a metalmind: ownership. In order to recover a stored Attribute, there has to be an External Connection showing that the Attribute considers the person as its owner. Only then can the Feruchemist create an Internal Connection that can be pulled to bring the Attribute into his Spiritweb. This is why Feruchemists normally can't access the metalmind of another Feruchemist unless that other Feruchemist performs the Identity-storing trick that creates unkeyed metalminds.

Introduction: What We Know About Southerner Medallions I'm sure some of you are already sick and tired of medallion-related speculations, so before I start giving my own take on this Scadrian mystery, let me first summarize what we already know. Let us clear our minds first and take a hard look at what was already revealed about these medallions, both in BoM and in various WoBs, because there are facts about these objects that many people forget or aren't even aware of. The Southerners create medallions using devices called Excisors. These excerpts from BoM show that any medallion theory cannot be complete without an Excisor theory, because it is through these devices that medallions are created. We should always keep Excisors in mind. In fact, while we already have a canon term for an Identity-less metalmind (what Marasi calls an unkeyed metalmind), I would like to propose this fan term: "excised metalmind" for a metalmind created with an Excisor, as opposed to the "unsealed metalmind" term I've been seeing that is frankly confusing. (Update: As @Oversleep pointed out, "unsealed metalmind" actually came from Brandon. So...oh well.) Creating medallions require Connector powers. This is a WoB from a recent signing in Germany. As you all know, Feruchemical duralumin stores Connection. Strangely enough, I have yet to see anyone post a medallion/Excisor theory involving Connection (everyone seems to believe VenDell in that it only involves Identity and Investiture), so I don't know what prompted that question. But suffice to say that thanks to this WoB, my medallion theory will involve Connection. The key to understanding medallions is that they are a way of fooling the magic system into thinking that you have the right sDNA. Take note, this is a totally different thing from what the Set's unkeyed metalminds do. The unkeyed goldmind that Wayne uses is a hack on the ownership requirement of Feruchemy. What Brandon is saying here is that medallions require a separate hack. Medallions can be used by non-Scadrians This is from the same Germany signing as above. This should put to rest any theory involving the need for Terris or Scadrian blood. Sorry, VenDell fans. The medallions interfere with each other. Unlike Hemalurgic spikes, one cannot obtain multiple powers by getting multiple medallions. Again, this is a problem that has gotten little attention from Sharder theorists. I intend to rectify that. The Southerners had to figure out two-powered medallions by themselves. This gives the following implications: - The Sovereign only taught them how to use Excisors to create single-powered medallions like the memory coin we've seen. - The method for creating a multi-powered medallion from multiple Metalborn is very difficult to scale. So, those are some things we know for sure about the medallions. Before I continue, here's one thing that I'm pretty certain of, even though we don't have direct confirmation of it: You cannot Feruchemically tap Investiture from the medallions unless they contain Nicrosil Feruchemy As @Moogle repeatedly points out in this thread, we don't ever see people being described as tapping the nicrosilminds in the medallions (with the exception of the Bands of Mourning), despite the numerous descriptions of them tapping or storing from the non-nicrosil part of the medallions. For example, in the Epilogue Wax only senses the Memory store of the copper part in the memory coin, not the Investiture store of the nicrosil part. Remember that aside from the Bands, each nicrosil ring in a medallion only contains one power. In the memory coin, the nicrosilmind contained Copper Feruchemy. In a Weight+Heat medallion the inner nicrosil ring contains Iron Feruchemy while the other nicrosil ring stores Brass Feruchemy. Without Nicrosil Feruchemy, one cannot Feruchemically tap Investiture from a nicrosilmind. Hence, while Nicrosil Feruchemy was obviously used to create Southern medallions, something else entirely must be responsible for their ability to grant powers. Now, allow me to go into deep speculation based on those facts. First I will discuss the different ways an object can be Connected to another object in the cosmere and how that relates to Feruchemy and Hemalurgy. Then I will discuss several theories about Hemalurgy that will form the backbone of my Excisor theory. Of course, I'll need to cover soul interference and the theory behind multi-powered medallions. Finally I will describe the steps of creating medallions, both single-powered ones and multi-powered ones. This will be a huge undertaking, so much that I've decided to divide everything into several posts. For those who don't have time, I will attempt a TL;DR: An unsealed metalmind can form a hybrid Being consisting of a person and itself, allowing the person to use the metalmind's Investiture without Feruchemically tapping it first. This property, shared with Hemalurgic spikes, exists because the unsealed metalmind contains a Hemalurgic charge, though this charge was taken without killing the donor. Finally, multi-powered medallions involve using the Connection of religious devotion to counteract soul interference between a medallion's nicrosilminds.

Citation needed. Sorry, but as someone with a theory revolving around harmonium/ettmetal existing before Sazed, I'd need something more solid than "harmonium is not an alloy so it can't have existed before Sazed." @TheLerasiumFerring, the thing is that we simply don't know anything about the origin of ettmetal. You're free to read this incredibly verbose theory thread of mine that in part discusses my speculations on ettmetal but, again, we simply don't know.

That was Khriss, not Aslydin. Oh, and...

Yeah, I've seen it several times here already. I tried looking, and the earliest instance of "mini Adonalsium" in the forums that I could find is in this post by Cheese Ninja back in 2011, and I suspect one would find older instances of this theory using better search keywords. Other popular theories in this vein include "Hoid is trying to unite all the Shards back and reforge Adonalsium" and "Hoid once held Adonalsium". In my opinion the "mini Adonalsium" idea is the most interesting, but then I really just want to see Hoid collecting more bits of Investiture.

That's interesting. I was basing my idea on the common "woman subduing a lion" imagery, but I guess I mistook that to mean physical strength. My bad.

Sadly, no. Maybe one day I'll hire someone to make it for me. Right now I'm not even that satisfied with some of my card ideas, particularly The Chariot, Justice, and Strength. Speaking of Strength, yeah I think using Elend does seem fitting. I'm imagining the scene where he fights Koloss and eventually Marsh. Well, whichever scene you end up depicting I'm sure it will be great.

Ooh! Another cosmere-related tarot deck! Here's my Stormlight Archive-themed deck (possible SA spoilers, obviously). It's all just descriptions for now; I never got to make actual artwork for it because I don't really have the talent. Anyway, good luck on your little project! I think your choices for the Fool and Magician cards are perfect. Can't wait to see the rest!

That's actually the opposite of what the WoBs say. The one Pagerunner quoted above explicitly said that the Hemalurgist would probably be able to use the victim's metalmind. The WoB in Kurk's thread that I was referring to above explicitly uses Connection to explain how the Gold Compounder could still burn his metalminds after his Feruchemical gold is removed. Edit: ninja'd

Thanks, @Pagerunner! @Kurkistan, I think it's interesting that Brandon uses Identity to explain how a Hemalurgist could access his victim's metalminds, while he uses Connection to explain a Gold Compounder's ability to burn his metalminds for Health even when his Feruchemical gold is removed. I wonder if a sufficiently knowledgeable Twinborn Connector could do a Connection-based hack to burn any metal/metalmind (or, more likely, just other Connector's duraluminminds).

I vaguely remember a WoB regarding whether or not you can use the metalminds of someone whose Feruchemical ability you stole via Hemalurgy, but it doesn't seem to be in Theoryland. Does anyone remember where it is (if it really does exist and I'm not just misremembering things)?

From WoR chapter 45: If you remember, Hoid talks to Shallan shortly after this scene. Note that it isn't explicitly shown that he performed Allomancy, but it's been speculated for a long time that the "powder" Shallan saw him drink was an Allomantic metal. Given that Brandon already said that we saw Hoid use Allomancy, that chapter is the obvious place to look. A popular theory is that Hoid was using Emotional Allomancy on Shallan during their conversation.