Hemalurgy, Forging and Bloodsealing

[TheOneKEA]

After I finished reading The Emperor's Soul, three questions came to mind:

- Can you use Hemalurgy to steal an ability from a Forger when that ability was granted by one of their Essence Marks?

- Can you bind a person using Bloodsealing if all you have from that person is a Hemalurgically charged spike? This obviously assumes that the person is still alive and that their sDNA wasn't too badly assaulted by the creation of the spike.

- Following on from the second question, can you use a Hemalurgically charged spike to sic a Bloodsealer's monsters on someone?

I'd love to know what forum goers think about this - Brandon has said elsewhere that Hemalurgy is applicable Cosmere-wide and I'm curious to see how it affects the magics in TES.

[ulyssessword he/him]

My thoughts:

- You cannot give yourself magical powers using an essence mark, it is too improbable/your soul is not familiar with it.

- Bloodsealing requires physical blood to act as the ink, so no.

- ...maybe. If you were to kill the target with a spike, and spike someone else with it, it is possible that the skeletons would go after the new person, as they contain the target's soul. I'm not sure.

[TheOneKEA]

My thoughts:

- You cannot give yourself magical powers using an essence mark, it is too improbable/your soul is not familiar with it.

- Bloodsealing requires physical blood to act as the ink, so no.

- ...maybe. If you were to kill the target with a spike, and spike someone else with it, it is possible that the skeletons would go after the new person, as they contain the target's soul. I'm not sure.

As far as I know, Hemalurgy is not limited to not stealing magical powers; it can be used for things as varied as anchoring a kandra's Cognitive aspect and stealing the sDNA that binds Shardblades to a person. That's why I wondered if Hemalurgy could steal anything else, including abilities granted via Essence Marks.

As for the links with Bloodsealing, Brandon said once that the motion of human blood within the body is important to Hemalurgy (Unfortunately I don't have a citation so I might be wrong here). That made me wonder how it cold be linked to Bloodesaling; I envisioned a scenario where Shai gets spiked to steal the abilities granted by the "Shaizan" mark and then the spike is used to Bloodseal her into another prison.

[Joe ST he/him]

Your ideas about Hemalurgy bring up some interesting things

Forgery is all about memory (similar to copper Feruchemy), or maybe the past (similar to gold/malatium Allomancy).

Hemalurgy can (steal and) endow non-magical improvements, such as the kandra blessings and the koloss spikes. This could be similar to how Shai's Essences Marks give her power.

[Voidus]

I think you'd be able to get non-genetic abilities through forging, you could forge yourself to have been given Breaths for instance or that you'd been spiked or nahel bonded with a spren, but with something like allomancy I think it unlikely. I wonder if you could forge an object into thinking it had been Awakened.

[FaeMofo]

I think you'd be able to get non-genetic abilities through forging, you could forge yourself to have been given Breaths for instance or that you'd been spiked or nahel bonded with a spren, but with something like allomancy I think it unlikely. I wonder if you could forge an object into thinking it had been Awakened.

That would be interesting, but I wouldn't want to see thousands of Nightbloods running around because the forger gave them improper commands, that would be worrying. I'm wondering whether you can convince a corpse that its a lifeless or give yourself a divine breath and awaken yourself.

[happyman he/him]

Given even these possibilities, I'm glad forging takes a lot of time and work. It would be so obscenely overpowered otherwise. Of course, most of the magics involve investiture and it's entirely possible forging can't fake that.

[name_here]

-Probably. I wouldn't be entirely suprised if it ruined the Essence Mark in the process and made it (and probably every other Essence Mark) not take even if they survived the experience.

-Nope. Even though all the appropriate spiritual components are probably available, Bloodsealing uses blood, not metal.

-Maybe? We don't really know a lot about how the skeletals track people. They're clearly not thrown off the scent by stamps, but we don't know exactly how those interact with the other Realms.

[Millennium]

After I finished reading The Emperor's Soul, three questions came to mind:

- Can you use Hemalurgy to steal an ability from a Forger when that ability was granted by one of their Essence Marks?

I would guess so, given that they both act on the Spiritweb. But it leaves open the question of why Essence Marks unravel. If the Spiritweb-fragment itself is responsible for the unraveling, then would it unravel even if stolen? If so, what happens to a person when a Hemalurgic spike loses its Spiritweb-fragment?

- Can you bind a person using Bloodsealing if all you have from that person is a Hemalurgically charged spike? This obviously assumes that the person is still alive and that their sDNA wasn't too badly assaulted by the creation of the spike.

I'd guess no, for two reasons. One is that if all you have is the spike, then you don't have any blood, and you need blood.

The other is that Hemalurgy actually robs a person of that part of their Spiritweb. Whatever's in the spike is not a part of that person anymore, so you couldn't make a new seal using it (or perhaps you could, but it would apply to the recipient of the spike, not the person the spike came from). That said, I'd theorize that you could use it to alter existing seals, if you steal whatever it is that the seal tracks. You could make it not apply to its original target anymore, and then change the target to someone else by spiking them. I can only assume, however, that there would be Nasty Side Effects.

- Following on from the second question, can you use a Hemalurgically charged spike to sic a Bloodsealer's monsters on someone?

Technically possible if my theory holds, but probably not practical. You'd have to steal whatever it is that Bloodsealers track from someone who is already being tracked, then spike your intended target. The problem is that the blood used to send out the skeletals would still go stale at the usual rate, so you'd only have about 24 hours to get all of this done, and then the skeletals would be useless again. And there's still the problem of Nasty Side Effects.

Edited December 17, 2012 by Millennium

[Child of Honor]

Also, would it be possible to Forge a piece of metal so that it was at one point used as a Hemalurgic spike, thereby making it possible to gain powers Hemalurgically without necessitating the deaths of innocents?

[Millennium]

Also, would it be possible to Forge a piece of metal so that it was at one point used as a Hemalurgic spike, thereby making it possible to gain powers Hemalurgically without necessitating the deaths of innocents?

That, I'd imagine, would depend somewhat on mechanics of Hemalurgy we haven't yet seen. We know that Hemalurgic spikes work by carrying a fragment of someone's Spiritweb, but is this fragment embedded into the spike's Spiritweb or is it a distinct (though attached) entity? If it's the former, then although you'd have to write a Spiritweb-fragment for what the spike stole, I don't think there's anything else to prevent it from working. If it's the latter, then you'd still have to write a Spiritweb-fragment, but since it is not part of the spike, you'd have to stamp something else in order for the Forgery to take. What would you stamp? Can this even work?

Also, there's the problem of the temporary nature of Forging: what happens if a Forged spike's stamp wears off before being refreshed?

Here are some questions I've got:

- Could you Reseal a spike victim, repairing the damage to their Spiritweb? What would happen to the spike if you did this?

- Could you use Hemalurgic principles -not the kinds of spikes we currently know, but the same general idea- to make an Essence mark permanent by "stapling it down"?

[Krelian]

Also, there's the problem of the temporary nature of Forging: what happens if a Forged spike's stamp wears off before being refreshed?

I'd guess the spiked person would either lose that ability, or, depending on where the spike had been placed, die. When a spike is through a major organ, it seems that the investiture in the spike is the only thing that prevents the wound from being lethal.

Here are some questions I've got:

- Could you Reseal a spike victim, repairing the damage to their Spiritweb? What would happen to the spike if you did this?

Hmm, that might be a way to avoid the aforementioned death, but it would require some really intense Forging, since you'd be rebuilding part of their Spiritweb from scratch. I don't know that Forging is powerful enough to just "rewind" to before the spike was there. And you'd still have to be sure to refresh the stamp regularly or you'd suddenly end up re-spiked.

- Could you use Hemalurgic principles -not the kinds of spikes we currently know, but the same general idea- to make an Essence mark permanent by "stapling it down"?

I doubt it. Hemalurgy requires that something be stolen from another Spiritweb, as far as I know. I don't think you could use it on something self-contained, like Essence marks made by you, for you.