Regenerating Divine Breaths?

[Trusk'our he/him]

A Divine Breath is different from a regular Bio-Chromatic Breath because it is an actual part of the Spiritweb.

Spoiler

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/80/#e5282

Questioner

With spikes, would you be able to actually transfer Breaths, when they get to the other planets?

Brandon Sanderson

So spikes rip off pieces of the soul and so Breaths are not going to be part of the soul. You could maybe get a divine Breath but I haven't really decided on regular Breaths, they're kind of stuck there in the Physical Realm which is not a thing that spikes are dealing with. Divine Breath, potentially, because that's something that's actually melding onto your soul. But, you know, when you're using the Breaths they reach through to the Spiritual Realm so, maybe if you got it while the Breaths were kinetic, right, while you're using them, then you might be able to rip them off. I'm not a hundred percent certain on that one.

Bystander

There's still things to decide upon.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah there's still things, like I have to kind of see. My instinct says no right now. But, you know, how they interact is not something that I have-- Yeah.

As such, does this mean that a Hemalurgist could non-lethally spike a portion of the Breath away with practice, then give the Returned a large dose of healing via F-gold (granted through a Hemalurgic spike and Compounding to gain the health) or Regrowth to regenerate the lost portion of the Breath?

Perhaps this would be a slightly convoluted, somewhat inefficient way to produce a lot of mini-Divine Breaths.

Actually, since the donor is the same for all the Investiture, you could probably stack charges, say spike 25% of the Breath at once, regenerate it, then spike out another 25% for 50% of a Divine Breath (not including Hemalurgic decay, of course).

There definitely may be some complications for the use of other types of Investiture grafting onto the Returned's Spiritweb instead of Endowment's, but it's still Innate Investiture you're taking in the end.

[Treamayne]

6 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

As such, does this mean that a Hemalurgist could non-lethally spike a portion of the Breath away with practice, then give the Returned a large dose of healing via F-gold (granted through a Hemalurgic spike and Compounding to gain the health) or Regrowth to regenerate the lost portion of the Breath?

Unlikely that Preservation's investiture could "heal" a splinter of Endowment. 

[Radium he/him]

15 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

As such, does this mean that a Hemalurgist could non-lethally spike a portion of the Breath away with practice, then give the Returned a large dose of healing via F-gold (granted through a Hemalurgic spike and Compounding to gain the health) or Regrowth to regenerate the lost portion of the Breath?

Would spiking a Returned grant a person the full effect of a Divine Breath? Such as the agelessness part.

[Trusk'our he/him]

40 minutes ago, Radium said:

Would spiking a Returned grant a person the full effect of a Divine Breath? Such as the agelessness part.

I think most of it, yes, such as the Heightenings.

It's debatable whether or not the visions would work, but changing your appearance and getting physical strength and speed would likely come with the Breath as well, since the Royal Locks are due to fragments of Divine Breath being present in the Hallandren royal line and they allow for physical change in appearance and Heightenings;

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

Vasher Explains Some Things, but Leaves Some Things Hidden

I'm worried about leaving Vivenna's two questions unanswered. One is pretty obvious—how Vasher can hide how he looks—but the other is unintuitive. I wish I could explain better in the book, as I said above, but I decided in the end to just leave it hanging. It's a bit of a violation of Sanderson's First Law, but not a big one. The reason I feel I can get away with it is because Vasher didn't use his nature as a Returned to solve any problems. It is more a flavoring for his character than it is important to him getting out of danger or fixing things. He could have done everything he needed to in this book without being Returned. So I feel it's okay not to explain why he can be Returned and not die when he gives away his Breaths.

Can Vivenna change her appearance more? She can indeed. She could actually stoke that fragment of a divine Breath inside of her and start glowing like a Returned. She can't change her physical features to look like someone else, but she can change her age, her height (within reason), and her body shape (to an extent). It takes practice.

And yes, the scraggly miscreant is how Vasher sees himself. Not noble and Returned, which is part of how he suppresses his divine Breath.

Events in the second book may change that.

 

#royal locks #vasher #vivenna

Sources: Warbreaker Annotations - Epilogue

 

[alder24]

43 minutes ago, Radium said:

Would spiking a Returned grant a person the full effect of a Divine Breath? Such as the agelessness part.

Not exactly, Hemalurgy always loses some investiture when performed. There would be some loss to the power of a Divine Breath, it would drop below the 5th Heightening and you would not get the agelessness bonus because of that. The more the spike is outside of the body, the more investiture would it lost. 

However, you would not need to feed it with Breaths, because your body is alive - at least that's nice.

Spoiler

Haverworthy

Just had a question, when a Returned consumes a Breath, is it a property of their body that does so or the Divine Breath itself? It's been contentious in the community. If it's specifically just their body and a hemalurgist were to spike a Divine Breath as indicated was possible here*, would the hemalurgist not need to consume a weekly breath?

*https://wob.coppermind.net/events/364/#e11389

Brandon Sanderson

That's a very interesting question. The thing that requires the Returned to continue gaining investiture is their nature as cognitive shadows--they are dead, and in this case, need a power source to continue persisting in the physical realm. The Divine Breath is part of this. Imagine the Divine Breath as the thing that Infuses their soul, making it persist initially, and then and sticks it to the body. So if you stole it, but you yourself were not in need of being kept alive, I would say that you wouldn't need to be fed a new breath each week to maintain the Divine Breath.

General Reddit 2020 (Oct. 4, 2020)