Brandon Sanderson

Tell me when they come up with a working replica of Vindication.

Don´t know if you guys know (i didn´t until a few minutes ago), there is a progressbar for a "Mystery Project" on Brandons website. Appraently it´s going to be YA. Any guesses/hopes what it could be? I´m guessing either Rithmantist 2 or Alcatraz 6, but i´m hoping for Silence Divine or Dark One^^

Obviously it's going to be Reckoners: Secret History, about Steelheart's ghostly adventures after David killed him.

So, question inspired by a conversation I had elsewhere recently. What exactly is the nature of Investiture?

That's honestly an insanely complicated question, so let's unpack it a bit.

Investiture is, so far as I can tell, the stuff that allows magic to happen in the Cosmere. But the way this works seems to vary pretty widely. I can think of at least three different ways it's used.

The first way is the most intuitive. Investiture is basically Mana. You have a certain Investiture reserve, and when you do magic, that reserve is depleted. When you run out of Investiture, the magic stops. This is how stormlight works. Pretty simple.

The second is when Investiture works as a sort of catalyst. Something has to be Invested in order to use magic, but it also needs something else. This is how Allomancy works, for example. Allomancers themselves have a certain amount of Investiture, but they still need metals to burn or they can't do anything. Elantrians work the same way — they're Invested themselves, but without the proper Aons, they can't do anything.

The third way is sort of a hybrid of the first two. You move Investiture into something and that allows it to do stuff (like the first type) but the Investiture never actually depletes and can keep doing its thing forever (like the second type). Biochroma works like this — you have to move Breaths into something in order to Awaken it, but Awakening doesn't actually consume Breaths. As far as I'm aware, Breaths will stick around in an Awakened object forever, until they're either retrieved or the object is broken (at which point the Breath is lost?)

Does that seem right to everybody? It seems odd to me that the same basic thing can be used in such different ways. Investiture-as-Mana seems to be the most basic version of it — we see it with stuff like stormlight, but also feruchemy and hemalurgy (where charged metalminds and spikes are Infused — which is why it's harder to steelpush/ironpull them, for instance).

So is there any way to square that circle? Are allomancers somehow tapping into a Background Magic Field of free-floating Investiture? Does Breath somehow channel Investiture so that Awakened objects are using a steady stream of the stuff without consuming the Breaths themselves?

It gets even weirder when you look at the raw physical form of Investiture itself, like lerasium and atium, or shardblades and shardplate. These cannot be Infused (eg, lashings don't work on shardblades and shardplate), but can be affected by magic (eg, you can ironpull atium), whereas Infused objects are the opposite (a feruchemist can Infuse a hunk of metal to turn it into a metalmind, but that makes it harder for an allomancer to steelpush or ironpull it).

I don't really have a solid conclusion there. As far as I can tell, Investiture works in at least two largely unrelated ways. I mostly wanted to point out my observations and see if anyone smarter than me has a better answer.

The people on Scadrial were all given a portion of Preservation's power, and we saw with the mists that Preservation's power regenerates over time, so I'd guess the same thing is going on inside Allomancers, hence why they never run out of the ability to use Allomancy as they get older (the metals are described as being a catalyst, basically a key that unlocks the ability, but not the ability itself). Breaths on Nalthis presumably work in a similar way: when you transfer your Breath to another person or object, you're transfering the whole, self-regenerating source of the Investiture.

Stormlight, by contrast, seems like getting the part of a fruit that you'd eat, but not the seeds to actually grow more of the fruit.

I wonder if there's a finite amount? I mean, it seems that nearly all Investiture (save for Drominad?) is tied to a Shard, and if not, at least to Adonalsium.

Pretty sure when Investiture is used up (such as when Stormlight is used or someone dies with Breaths), the power returns to the Shard, who then returns it to the world again. So whether it has a hard cap on the maximum amount of Investiture in a system or not, it's effectively infinite because it is recycled perfectly. Nightblood is the exception, as he "corrupts" Investiture, but while Sanderson has said that none of the current Shards can purify his corrupted Investiture, that implies someone holding more Shards might be able to.

I'm honestly not even sure if the thing where people on Scadrial were a tiny bit Preservation-invested is unique to Scadrial or not. Scadrial was created wholesale by Preservation and Ruin (as opposed to other worlds, where humanity predates the shards), but neither could create due to the nature of their individual powers, so they had to work together on that. Humanity had a bit more of Preservation than of Ruin in order to make them sapient. Does that mean that all humans are slightly Invested? Or is that just a weird Scadrial thing?

I´m not sure about the exact definition of "invested" but if you count everything with at least a tiny amount of Investiture, then yes every human is invested, since the spark of life is also Investiture.

@Native Jovian: you're forgetting Aon Dor, where Investiture is pressurized and essentially anyone can use it if they come from the right geographical region and make the right shape. That's probably the closest you come to a Background Magic Field.

For the fifth kind, there's non-Sharded Investiture in the Birds, and the one we haven't seen yet with the diseases. Those SEEM to be the permanent mutation kind, where either the Investiture being present but not used passively causes an effect, or the investiture causes a one-time, permanent alteration that, i don't know, messes with how the entity is either Cognitively or Spiritually, giving them an altered perception.

How WOULD the birds work, anyway? Especially the death-prophecy one. Best I can figure out is the same way the old Terris Religion made their prophecies, but unless I missed something, we never really got answer as to how THAT happened, mechanically, because i can see NO WAY you can use Feruchemy to see into the future. The other best guess is the Death Bird works the same way the Unmade who gives Death Rattles does, but on a smaller target.

Huh. That's a thought. Is THAT bird of Odium?

edited 6th Nov '17 3:27:10 PM by SCMof2814

I mentioned Aon Dor? Not by name, but I mentioned Elantrians. And I'm pretty sure for Elantris, at least, it's not true that just anyone can use it. You have to be Elantrian and know the proper Aons. (Forgery seems to be a different matter, but it's not entirely clear.)

Ah, my mistake. I was speaking of the planet in general, but mentioned Aon Dor specifically. I never really got around to finding the name of that martial arts thing that seemed to use Dor, but THAT certainly seemed like an ability anyone can use. The evil monks seemed to screen for fanaticism and EVIL, but only really seemed to need getting the runes written into your bones, not needing to be from any place or bloodline in particular. And this is the same world that has Forgery and Remembering (aka Forgery-Lite), and possibly more depending on the country. And there's whatever the Mysteries, which seems to run on human sacrifice, an attribute shared only by two other system is the Cosmere, one of which comes from the same planet.

The runes in the monks' bones were Domination's system, not Devotion's, right?

I'm not sure we need to differentiate between them anymore. After all, their power is mixed together and pressurized as a result now. Thanks, Odium!

Dominion, but yeah, I believe so.

According to Arcanum Unbounded, every magic system on Sel is both Dominion and Devotion. However, I would guess that Elantris is primarily Devotion while the monks are primarily Dominion; like how an honorspren on Roshar is technically a mix of Honor and Cultivation, but heavily weighted towards Honor.

Well, I finished The Bands Of Mourning. After a fun first act, the middle part of the book wasn't gripping me very much (though I have to say the characters have become good enough that it's really fun just to see them do things, even when you're waiting for the plot to get into avalanche mode), but as soon as the betrayer is revealed it became top-tier and stayed that way until the end. And now, for the first time, I have to wait for the next book in the series.

The best two things in the book are definitely Wayne's scenes after Wax's supposed death, and finally seeing Marasi (and later Wax) getting a chance to showcase a barrage of super-OP allomantic/feruchemistic combos. After all the crap they had to endure, it's really liberating. It sort of felt like (spoilers for My Hero Academia) the latest MHA chapters, where because of a couple coincidences the main character can use 100% of his superpowers for a little time, rather than the usual 5-8%.

Oh, and since Kelsier's resurrection is now part of the main plot (and since I'm not the kind of person who's good at waiting), I'll pick up Secret History. I still honestly think it would be better if he just stayed dead, but that's me having problems with resurrections in general (except for those that can be attributed to Just Mostly Dead).

edited 13th Nov '17 10:34:45 AM by Cozzer

I mean, *technically* this applies to Kelsier. His Cognitive Shadow cheated himself out of passing on.

While reading Oathbringer (who isn't? You heretic! Death by snu-snu!), I had cause (you'll realize which part) to wonder at all the Shard-based profanity. Specifically, the phrase 'Merciful Domi'. Could Dominion have ever actually been merciful? Worded the way it is, it sounds like a plea rather than the equivalent of 'once in a blue moon' (which on Roshar is every night). On thinking about it, it might actually have been a not-uncommon occurrence. It might be taking 'Dominion' too literally, but ruling people need not necessarily mean you be an ass about it. And for some reason, this expression is more prevalent in the 'good guy', non-Feordel portions of that world, as opposed to the more-obviously Dominion-influenced one.

Also, random thought: would an iron-puller be naturally good at using the Surge of Gravitation to fly (if they had it, of course)? it's basically their dream, to just pull themselves into the air, and Allomancy comes with a lot more instinctive knowledge on stuff like this. My thought is all that practice with ironpulling would translate to better flight as a beginner.

Huh, how about an iron feruchemist with Gravitation? Talk about a human bomb...

Sorry, double post, but just realized something. In ALL the cosmere we've seen so far, despite all the problems prophecy has caused them, Scadrial is the ONLY place that has no taboo on divination and prophecy. Other places, such as Roshar and Nalthis, such things are heavily taboo, even if the local system of investiture (on Nalthis) doesn't let you do it. A mark of all the places Odium has caused problems for?

Come to think of it, it's interesting that Ruin's metal let you see into the future. It seems to be a grim power in the Cosmere.

(I kind of wonder of Godmetals are influenced solely by the shard, or if it's something about Ati that causes his metal to show you the future. It doesn't seem to have much to do with Ruin, despite its combat applications.)

Technically, Electrum lets you do the same. The difference is Atium lets you narrow down the future you see.

To extend on what you said, Larasium gives you allomancy, which seems to have little to do with preserving things, and Harmonium is so chemically unstable it explodes like a bomb when touched by water, which isn't very harmonious. Maybe the godmetals have thematically-inverse properties?

Allomancy is the Preservation art, though. Yes, I know it's fucking weird that the end-neutral art isn't the preservation thing, but facts is facts.

Atium making futures visible I can see in a Ruin -> entropy -> endings -> future way.

Harmonium should still be called Sazedium and I guess adding water fucks with its carefully cultivated harmony?

I point out that balance (or harmony) does not need to mean *stable*

Oh, like balancing on the edge of catastrophe? If so, Sazed's sense of humor has gotten weirder