Allomantic Silver

[Ancient Elantrian Elan/Elan/Elan/Elan/Elan]

So, we all know that silver isn’t an allomantic metal, but I’m pretty sure that Brandon Sanderson said in a WoB that preservation kicked off some metals to make there be 16. I’m wondering if silver was one of those?

[Trusk'our he/him]

1 hour ago, Ancient Elantrian said:

So, we all know that silver isn’t an allomantic metal, but I’m pretty sure that Brandon Sanderson said in a WoB that preservation kicked off some metals to make there be 16. I’m wondering if silver was one of those?

I sort doubt it. Silver was used in place of tin originally, and the Mistings who burned it were called Silvereyes. I think that another metal (probably one of the four not available with era 1 technology) was bumped to make room for Atium Mistings.

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https://wob.coppermind.net/events/141/#e2391

Brandon Sanderson

One interesting aspect of the book that I haven't mentioned yet comes with the metal of tin. Originally, tin wasn't one of the Allomantic metals—I used silver instead. You see, I originally paired silver and pewter together, thinking that pewter had a significant amount of silver in it. Well, turns out that isn't the case. (Remember, each set of paired metals is a metal and an alloy made from it.)

My false impression on the belief that pewter is a silver/lead alloy goes back to my childhood. I remember when I used to paint lead fantasy figures that I bought at the local hobby store. One of the employees told me that they would be going up in price because the manufacturers wanted the figures to be safer. They were going to cast them out of pewter instead of lead, because pewter is much less toxic. I asked what the difference between pewter and lead was, and the employee told me that pewter is lead PLUS silver, and that's why the figures cost more.

He meant tin, I guess. Either way, that's stayed with me for quite a long time. I soundly resisted changing silver to tin during the first drafts of the book, even when I found out the truth. The problem is, I really liked the name "Silvereye" for those who burn silver/tin. It sounds far slicker than "Tineye."

I eventually came around, however. Consistency in the magic system is more important than a single cool-sounding name. I blame Hobby Town in Lincoln Nebraska for my pains.

Quote

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/518/#e16183

Argent

It seems there is a special interaction between silver and investiture, in at least certain places in the Cosmere. We've seen how silver interacts with aethers, and we've seen over on Threnody. So that makes silver the second really really special metal to interact with investiture. Is the plan now to have aluminum block investiture, and silver destroy investiture?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, that's the way I'm going with it. To make a distinction between them, that's where we're going.

Argent

But silver is still non-allomantic. No silvereyes.

Brandon Sanderson

No, non-allomantic, yup. No silvereyes. This is my nod towards silvereye-ness, and yeah, there we go.

Argent

So would [silver] be effective against spren, just like [anti-Investiture]?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, you'll have to find out. RAFO!

 

[Treamayne]

3 hours ago, Ancient Elantrian said:

So, we all know that silver isn’t an allomantic metal, but I’m pretty sure that Brandon Sanderson said in a WoB that preservation kicked off some metals to make there be 16. I’m wondering if silver was one of those?

1 hour ago, Trusk'our said:

 I think that another metal (probably one of the four not available with era 1 technology) was bumped to make room for Atium Mistings.

Atium and Malatium replaced Cadmium and Bendalloy because they were Temporal Metals that could not be accessed without more technology:

WoBs: (snipped to relevant bits)

Spoiler

Quote

little wilson (paraphrased)

I saw Brandon at a book signing back in mid-December, and I asked him about the 16 percent deal. He said that Preservation replaced the real External Temporal Metals with atium and malatium (at least I'm assuming malatium, but he didn't mention that specifically. He only said atium). So not-cerrobend and cadmium weren't counted in the 16%. nicrosil and chromium, on the other hand, were. So there are chromium andnicrosil Mistings running around, not knowing that they're Mistings.

Note: Cerrobend was intended to be the alloy of Cadmium - until Sanderson learned the name was under copyright - at the time of this WoB he had not yet decided on the new name - Bendalloy

Quote

Brandon Sanderson

Preservation wanted atium and malatium to be of use to the people, as he recognized that it would be a very powerful tool—and that using it up could help defeat Ruin. But he also recognized that sixteen was a mythological important number, and felt it would make the best sign for his followers. So he took out the most unlikely (difficult to make and use) metals for his sign to his followers.

 

 

[Trusk'our he/him]

21 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

Atium and Malatium replaced Cadmium and Bendalloy because they were Temporal Metals that could not be accessed without more technology:

Thanks for the WoBs. I knew they were out there somewhere, I just couldn't find them.

@Treamayne, you're probably the most proficient 17th Sharder when it comes to finding obscure WoBs or digging up quotes from books.

Would you by any chance know where to find a WoB stating that Marsh was able to survive getting one of his eye spikes removed because he had so many other spikes? It's somewhat relevant to one of my theories I want to post, and I know I've seen it somewhere in the Arcanum before, I just can't for the life of me find it again.

[Treamayne]

43 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

Would you by any chance know where to find a WoB stating that Marsh was able to survive getting one of his eye spikes removed because he had so many other spikes? It's somewhat relevant to one of my theories I want to post, and I know I've seen it somewhere in the Arcanum before, I just can't for the life of me find it again.

Marsh isn't missing an Eye Spike anymore:

Spoiler

WoB

Quote

Brandon Sanderson

Marsh Notes

One quick note on Marsh to end it out. If you'll remember, the crushed eye socket with the spike that has been pounded in came courtesy of Sazed back in book two. And the red tattoo he wears is an indication of what kind of Allomancer he was before being made into an Inquisitor.

Alloy of Law Spoilers (Epilogue)

Spoiler

Standing in the mouth of the smaller alleyway, waiting for her, was a tall man in a black robe.

She gasped, stepping backward. The man was well over six feet tall, and the enveloping robe gave him an ominous appearance. He brought up pale hands and took down his hood, exposing a shaved head and a face that was tattooed around the eyes in an intricate pattern.

Driven into those eyes, point-first, were what looked like a pair of thick railroad spikes. One of the eye sockets was deformed, as if it had been crushed, long-healed scars and bony ridges under the skin marring the tattoos.

Marasi knew this creature from mythology, but seeing him left her cold, terrified. “Ironeyes,” she whispered.

 

Unless you just meant HoA Chs 73-82 before he replaced it. In which case, why would he have died? TFE Epilogue. HoA Ch 73

Spoiler

Quote

 

“Does that…hurt, Marsh?” she asked. “The spikes, I mean?”

He paused. “Yes. All eleven of them…throb. The pain reacts to my emotions somehow.”

“Eleven?” Vin asked with shock.

Marsh nodded. “Two in the head, eight in the chest, one in the back to seal them together. That’s the only way to kill an Inquisitor—you have to separate the top spikes from the bottom ones. Kell did it through a beheading, but it’s easier to just pull out the middle spike.”

“We thought you were dead,” Vin said.

 

Quote

She grabbed the Inquisitor, pulling him up. His skin began to heal as he used his Feruchemical powers, and he struggled, growing stronger. Yet, even the awesome strength of Feruchemy made little difference against Vin. She pulled his eye-spikes free, tossed them aside, then left the corpse slumping in the rubble.

Twelve.

<snip>

Shaking, she reached for one of his eye-spikes.

There was nothing he could do. He’d used up most of the healing in his metal-mind, and the rest would do him no good. Stored healing worked by way of speed. He could either heal himself a small amount very quickly, or wait and heal himself slowly, yet completely. Either way, he was dead as soon as Vin pulled those spikes free.

Finally, he thought with relief as she grabbed the first spike. Whatever I did ... it worked. Somehow.

He felt Ruin’s rage, felt his master realizing his mistake. In the end, Marsh had mattered. In the end, Marsh hadn’t given up. He’d done Mare proud.

Vin pulled the spike free. It hurt, of course—hurt far more than Marsh would have thought possible. He screamed—both in pain and in joy—as Vin reached for the other eye-spike.

And then, she hesitated. Marsh waited expectantly. She shook, then coughed, cringing. She gritted her teeth, reaching toward him. Her fingers touched the spike.

And then, Vin vanished.

 

An Inquisitor has to lose either the Linchpin Spike (severing the Connection from the top and bottom) or both Eye spikes (effectivly severing the top from the bottom). A single Eye spike would always be survivable. I can find no WoBs on the Eyespike removal, only the crushed socket and what Marsh did to himself between HoA and AoL. 

Quote

Thanks for the WoBs. I knew they were out there somewhere, I just couldn't find them.

@Treamayne, you're probably the most proficient 17th Sharder when it comes to finding obscure WoBs or digging up quotes from books.

It's nothing Cosmic - just practice using the arcanum tags and boolean searches. For Book passages, it helps that I have all of the ebooks, and I use Calibre to manage them. Calibre has some insane search tools. Example:

Spoiler

The TFE quote was just searching for :

spike.+pull out

(tried "remove" first, but didn't get the hit) - in calibre, you can make very long search queries, but the easiest is using a period as a single characher wilecard and the plus sign to inditcate "one or more of this wildcard"

So "spike.+remove" search returned:

Spoiler

Quote

HoA Ch 13 - He’d pull the spike from his back and kill himself. Not out of frustration, and not out of despair. He knew that he had some important part to play in Ruin’s plans. If he removed himself at the right time

Quote

Ruin did actually manage to get a spike into Yomen, once. Yomen, however, removed the spike

 

 

 

Edited October 24, 2023 by Treamayne
Searches

[Trusk'our he/him]

Just now, Treamayne said:

Marsh isn't missing an Eye Spike anymore:

Well, yeah, he puts it back in after Vin Ascends. It was a question that someone had asked Brandon though, and he said something along the lines that piercing yourself with enough Hemalurgic spikes will effectively pin your Spiritweb to your body better, making it somewhat harder to kill you through normal means.

2 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

An Inquisitor has to lose either the Linchpin Spike (severing the Connection from the top and bottom) or both Eye spikes (effectivly severing the top from the bottom). A single Eye spike would always be survivable. I can find no WoBs on the Eyespike removal, only the crushed socket and what Marsh did to himself between HoA and AoL. 

Hmmm, I'll have to keep looking then. I know it exists. I think I may have posted a link to it a while back somewhere in the Forums.

Oh well, I need to search through them anyway for research purposes, so I guess I'll just see if I can find it when the time comes.

Thanks for looking anyway, I appreciate it 

[Treamayne]

2 hours ago, Trusk&#x27;our said:

2 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Marsh isn't missing an Eye Spike anymore:

Well, yeah, he puts it back in after Vin Ascends. It was a question that someone had asked Brandon though, and he said something along the lines that piercing yourself with enough Hemalurgic spikes will effectively pin your Spiritweb to your body better, making it somewhat harder to kill you through normal means.

Unfortunately, even with more information to work with, I still have not yet found this WoB. I'll try again tomorrow.

Sorry

[alder24]

14 hours ago, Ancient Elantrian said:

So, we all know that silver isn’t an allomantic metal, but I’m pretty sure that Brandon Sanderson said in a WoB that preservation kicked off some metals to make there be 16. I’m wondering if silver was one of those?

No, as said it was about Bendalloy and Cadmium. But this probably no longer applies because of the Atium Retcon. Atium Mistings were just Electrum Mistings, so switching out Atium/Malatium makes no sense now as there is no need for that. 

Spoiler

Xais56

Brandon has said that everyone ought to be able to burn Atium, like they can all burn Lerasium, and the fact that they can't was an oversight on his part that he would've done different in hindsight.

Maybe now he's had an in-universe reason to re-write the laws of allomancy it's back to his intended concept; Mistborn burn all 16 base metals, mistings burn one base metal, non-allomancers can only burn godmetal.

Peter Ahlstrom

My explanation for this is that Preservation somehow caused all naturally occurring atium to form as an alloy of atium and electrum. The atium Mistings were actually electrum Mistings.

Xais56

It's a very tidy solution, but it creates the maddening question of what does pure atium do?

Peter Ahlstrom

That answer has already been revealed canonically. RAFO.

Footnote: It has since been clarified that the effect was revealed on the Table of Allomantic Metals poster and seen at the end of The Hero of Ages.
General Reddit 2021 (Nov. 2, 2021)

To make both the retcon and WoBs about replacing metals with Atium and Malatium work together, I think that the people making Allomantic tables put god metal alloys in the place where bendalloy and cadmium were meant to be - but that's a human creation, artificial tables, not Preservation's doing. 

 

10 hours ago, Trusk&#x27;our said:

Well, yeah, he puts it back in after Vin Ascends. It was a question that someone had asked Brandon though, and he said something along the lines that piercing yourself with enough Hemalurgic spikes will effectively pin your Spiritweb to your body better, making it somewhat harder to kill you through normal means.

This?

Spoiler

Kaimipono

Why exactly do some spike removals kill (dual eye, or central spike) but most don't?

Brandon Sanderson

For the same reason that a bullet through one part of the body will kill you, but getting shot somewhere else won't. The physical form of a person who has undergone a Hemalurgic transformation is no longer what we think of it. The direct connection to Preservation starts keeping them alive. (Imagine stapling someone's soul to another person's soul, their life essence, then stapling that to the power of creation itself, giving you a conduit directly to power, letting you leech it and steal it.) That power keeps you alive, despite the wounds. Some of the time, the other staples are enough to keep you alive, even if one is pulled out. Others are too important.

Hero of Ages Q&A - Time Waster's Guide (Oct. 15, 2008)

 

[Ancient Elantrian Elan/Elan/Elan/Elan/Elan]

Okay, thanks y’all’s! I must’ve misread it or something when I first saw it.

[Xiahida]

16 hours ago, Ancient Elantrian said:

So, we all know that silver isn’t an allomantic metal, but I’m pretty sure that Brandon Sanderson said in a WoB that preservation kicked off some metals to make there be 16. I’m wondering if silver was one of those?

Sometimes when a Mistborn burns a wrong metal it can kill them. If silver destroys investature (ex:shades,spores) can burning silver or an alloy kill you. This is a theory relating to how it can be used but not what past problems with alloys contained. Silver isn't a part of the Allomantic table for reasons by Preservation so that is why there are no silver mistings. Does this make sense?

Edited October 24, 2023 by Xiahida

[alder24]

5 minutes ago, Xiahida said:

Sometimes when a Mistborn burns a wrong metal it can kill them.

Not every metal can be burned to begin with - burning wrong alloys of Allomantic metals can harm you. But silver was proven to be Allomantically inert, you can't even burn it.

11 minutes ago, Xiahida said:

If silver destroys investature (ex:shades,spores) can burning silver or an alloy kill you.

No. People on Scadrial tried burning silver. 

12 minutes ago, Xiahida said:

Silver isn't a part of the Allomantic table for reasons by Preservation so that is why there are no silver mistings.

Silver isn't a part of Allomancy. It's not a key for a power. That's not because of Preservation, Preservation didn't create Allomancy, Allomancy came into existence naturally from interactions between Scadrial and Shards that created it. 

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Sixty - Part One

Silver, the Useless Metal

I've annotated about this before, but I figured I'd mention it again. As you probably know, in book one, tin was originally silver. I swapped it out for various reasons.

However, that left silver having no Allomantic powers. That feels strange to a lot of people because of how common and useful it is in our modern culture. Such an obvious metal doing nothing seems wrong to readers.

I toyed with using it in place of aluminum at the end of book one, but I realized that wouldn't work. It was too common, so if it had any Allomantic powers, people would know about them for certain. Only a metal that was very hard to find—like aluminum—would be believable as a new metal that most people hadn't heard of.

So silver is Allomantically inert. Just one of the quirks of the magic system.

The Hero of Ages Annotations (Feb. 11, 2010)

 

Spoiler

Kenzal

Would it make an Allomancer sick if they tried to burn pure silver?

Brandon Sanderson

As it stands right now, nothing would happen, because they would know if it did. Good question. Silver has some weird properties, but on Scadrial they are largely undiscovered.

Skyward Atlanta signing (Nov. 17, 2018)

 

Spoiler

Argent

It seems there is a special interaction between silver and investiture, in at least certain places in the Cosmere. We've seen how silver interacts with aethers, and we've seen over on Threnody. So that makes silver the second really really special metal to interact with investiture. Is the plan now to have aluminum block investiture, and silver destroy investiture?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, that's the way I'm going with it. To make a distinction between them, that's where we're going.

Argent

But silver is still non-allomantic. No silvereyes.

Brandon Sanderson

No, non-allomantic, yup. No silvereyes. This is my nod towards silvereye-ness, and yeah, there we go.

Argent

So would [silver] be effective against spren, just like [anti-Investiture]?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, you'll have to find out. RAFO!

Footnote: Argent tried. He also horribly mangled his last question, but it got RAFO'd, so that doesn't matter...
Shardcast Interview (July 30, 2023)

 

Spoiler

wiresegal

Could someone burn an Allomantically inert metal that was Invested, like Invested silver or Invested lead?

Brandon Sanderson

...I'm gonna give you a no on this one. I rarely give straight up "no"s, but you've got to remember that the Allomantic metal is the key, and the power behind it is gonna be inaccessible without the key. Now, there are more things that are Allomantically viable than have been discovered or talked about. But that's the problem right there. If it's not the right metal, if it doesn't provide the right-- I'll just stop at key. If it isn't the right key. We'll get more into this as the cosmere progresses. That's a very rare no for me. Usually you're gonna get a "well, it depends."

Read For Pixels 2018 (Sept. 1, 2018)

 

[Trusk'our he/him]

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

No, as said it was about Bendalloy and Cadmium. But this probably no longer applies because of the Atium Retcon. Atium Mistings were just Electrum Mistings, so switching out Atium/Malatium makes no sense now as there is no need for that. 

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Xais56

Brandon has said that everyone ought to be able to burn Atium, like they can all burn Lerasium, and the fact that they can't was an oversight on his part that he would've done different in hindsight.

Maybe now he's had an in-universe reason to re-write the laws of allomancy it's back to his intended concept; Mistborn burn all 16 base metals, mistings burn one base metal, non-allomancers can only burn godmetal.

Peter Ahlstrom

My explanation for this is that Preservation somehow caused all naturally occurring atium to form as an alloy of atium and electrum. The atium Mistings were actually electrum Mistings.

Xais56

It's a very tidy solution, but it creates the maddening question of what does pure atium do?

Peter Ahlstrom

That answer has already been revealed canonically. RAFO.

Footnote: It has since been clarified that the effect was revealed on the Table of Allomantic Metals poster and seen at the end of The Hero of Ages.
General Reddit 2021 (Nov. 2, 2021)

To make both the retcon and WoBs about replacing metals with Atium and Malatium work together, I think that the people making Allomantic tables put god metal alloys in the place where bendalloy and cadmium were meant to be - but that's a human creation, artificial tables, not Preservation's doing. 

 

This?

  Hide contents

Kaimipono

Why exactly do some spike removals kill (dual eye, or central spike) but most don't?

Brandon Sanderson

For the same reason that a bullet through one part of the body will kill you, but getting shot somewhere else won't. The physical form of a person who has undergone a Hemalurgic transformation is no longer what we think of it. The direct connection to Preservation starts keeping them alive. (Imagine stapling someone's soul to another person's soul, their life essence, then stapling that to the power of creation itself, giving you a conduit directly to power, letting you leech it and steal it.) That power keeps you alive, despite the wounds. Some of the time, the other staples are enough to keep you alive, even if one is pulled out. Others are too important.

Hero of Ages Q&A - Time Waster's Guide (Oct. 15, 2008)

 

HOLY CRAP, you actually found it! 

You have no idea how long I've been looking for this WoB. Thank you @alder24, I'll make a post regarding it later, but I have to go to work in a few minutes.