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Stone and moving joints


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Okay, I know we have seen this is a working thing and I know that investiture is able to make it work but I am trying to picture it in my mind. Were Kalads phantoms solid stone and the investiture allowed it to bend? Or were they made of many different stone pieces set upon eachother like our bones are with joints? 

I have seen WoBs that indicate a body turned to stone could be awakened and brought back lifeless. But what of those joints? Will the investiture just turn the stone bendy enough to move? 

What of Roseite Aether? I assume Twinsoul's Golem was able to move, in the art it depicts him sitting in the center and controlling it with what I can only assume is through his mind and intent. Do you think that Roseite must be grown with many pieces that can move within eachother or do you think it can simply flex when and where it is needed by the Aetherbound growing it? 

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3 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Were Kalads phantoms solid stone and the investiture allowed it to bend?

It would appear that the Breath does allow the stone some flexibility, based on this WoB (SA Spoilers):

Spoiler

EMTrevor

Would an Awakener be able to awaken a corpse that was soulcast into stone more easily because it used to be living, thereby being able to create lifeless similar to Kalad's Phantoms without having bones in the framework?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. That would definitely work.

Tor.com The Way of Kings Re-Read Interview (June 10, 2014)

So, if that works and allows movement, then likely Kalad's Phantoms were also solid stone around a framework skeleton held together with their Lifeless Breath (WoB and Annotations on Warbreaker):

Spoiler

Annotations to Ch 58:

Quote

Unfortunately, through revising and developing the story, this ended up not being viable. I was also disappointed in how poorly telegraphed the use of the statues ultimately ended up being. So in revisions, I switched it to make them Lifeless created from bones, something special that Vasher came up with during the Manywar. I then added the concept of Kalad’s Phantoms as a mystery in the book, so that readers would be expecting that army to show up by the ending. I think this mitigates the surprise somewhat. 

WoB:

Quote

DylanHuebner

I was wondering how the animation of the lifeless statues worked, in regard to the use of Susebron's Breath. If they were lifeless, then vasher wouldn't have been able to take his Breath back out of them, nor would susebron have needed such a great deal of breath to revive them—he just would have needed a password. But if they were simply Awakened, no password would have been necessary to animate the statues, just Breath and Command.

It seems like the statues could be neither lifeless nor awakened. Are they unique, because of the use of bone, or am I missing something? The only other explanation I could think of was that they were lifeless, but Susebron's breath wasn't used to activate the statues, he simply had it passed down from vasher, in addition to the statues. If that's the case(and then I've simply been confusing myself with unnecessary, convoluted logic), why was it necessary to keep the breath safe for all these years?

Brandon Sanderson

Wow, there are a lot of questions in there. If you follow the drafts, I think you can see the evolution of what became of the Lifeless army. Originally I had planned for the statues to simply have been placed there so that you could Awaken them—just in my original concepts, before I started the writing—and then that became the army.

I eventually decided that didn't work for various reasons. Number one, as I developed the magic system, Awakening stone doesn't work very well. You've got to have limberness, you've got to have motion to something for it to actually be stronger. So a soldier made out of cloth would be more useful to you than a soldier made out of stone, if you were just Awakening something. At that point, as I was developing this, I went back to the drawing board and said okay, I need to leave him a whole group of really cool Lifeless as the army. But that had problems in that the ichor would not have stayed good long enough. Plus they already had a pretty big Lifeless army, so what was special about this one? Remember, I'm revising concepts like this as the book is going along. You can see where in the story I could see what needed to be there. So I went back to the drawing board again.

I think the original draft of WARBREAKER you can download off my website has them just as statues, though at the time when I was writing that I already knew it would need to change. I was just sticking to my outline because I needed to have the whole thing complete on the page before I could work with it. A lot of times that's how I do things as a writer—I get the rough draft down, and then I begin to sculpt.

I eventually developed essentially what you've just outlined in the first part, before you started worrying if you were too convoluted. I said, well, what if there's a hybrid? What happens if you Awaken bones? Can you create something? The reason that you can't draw the Breath back from a Lifeless is because the Breath clings to it. If the Lifeless were sentient enough, it could give up its own Breath, but you can't take it, just like you can't take a Breath from a person by force. You have to get them to give it up willingly. So it sticks to the Lifeless. A Lifeless is, let's say, 90% of a sentient being. The Breath doesn't manifest in them, because they aren't alive, yet they're almost there. A stone statue brought to life would be way down on the bottom rung.

Is there something in between? That's the advancement I had Vasher discover—what if we build something out of bone, but then encase it in stone to make it strong, and build it in ways that the bone is held together by the force of the Breaths? That's really what you're getting at there, that you need a lot of Breath, a lot of power, to hold all that stone together. There are seams at the joints. What the Breath is doing is clinging there like magical sinew, and it's holding all of that together.

Vasher left the Phantoms Invested with enough Breath to hold them together but not to move. You needed another big, substantial influx of Breath in order to actually make them have motion, to bring them enough strength to move and that sort of thing. So it's kind of a hybrid.

Goodreads Fantasy Book Discussion Warbreaker Q&A (Jan. 18, 2010)

So, it's almost like a two-stage awakening.

  1. Lifeless Awakening of the bones, making them lifeless
  2. Separate Awakening of the Stone to make it mobile and function by the same Lifeless Commands
    • This is why the breath from the Stone could be withdrawn, making them immobile; and a new Stone Awakening using Peacegiver's Treasure could restore their mobiity

 

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32 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

It would appear that the Breath does allow the stone some flexibility, based on this WoB (SA Spoilers):

  Reveal hidden contents

EMTrevor

Would an Awakener be able to awaken a corpse that was soulcast into stone more easily because it used to be living, thereby being able to create lifeless similar to Kalad's Phantoms without having bones in the framework?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. That would definitely work.

Tor.com The Way of Kings Re-Read Interview (June 10, 2014)

So, if that works and allows movement, then likely Kalad's Phantoms were also solid stone around a framework skeleton held together with their Lifeless Breath (WoB and Annotations on Warbreaker):

  Reveal hidden contents

Annotations to Ch 58:

WoB:

So, it's almost like a two-stage awakening.

  1. Lifeless Awakening of the bones, making them lifeless
  2. Separate Awakening of the Stone to make it mobile and function by the same Lifeless Commands
    • This is why the breath from the Stone could be withdrawn, making them immobile; and a new Stone Awakening using Peacegiver's Treasure could restore their mobiity

 

So rad. If this same idea crossed over to Aethers you could rock a suit of armor that allows full range of motion while having no visible gaps. 

Obviously it is still not shardplate or anything in terms of protection but with potential compounding hacks in the future this could be super dope (Bendalloy compounding for the win... heck even just a metalmind with months worth of water at once). I can see a dude just spending a day at the drinking fountain to carry around a ring sized reserve of water worth hundreds of camelbaks. 

Not to mention we already have one person who has hacked Stormlight enough to use it to maintain themselves... whos to say Aetherbound couldnt hack and  breath in unkeyed stormlight and feed it the way Twinsoul used the unkeyed dor? 

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