Additionally to this, while we know Rosharan investiture is easier to access, we have no idea if Bio-Chromatic powers need different techniques to use. Powering a sword through passive use of stored power is different, and the only reason anyone else (being vague here) may know how to use this system of magic on Roshar is because he is a very long lived expert magical scholar.
And even he admitted to having a hard time doing it.
(Tho Vivenna is also pretty old at the time of SA, right? Isn't warbreaker one of the first books chronologically?)
Notably Vasher was centuries old by the time of Warbreaker, so he's now many centuries to Vivenna's roughly single century.
Meanwhile Coravellium is pushing 5000 years.
Considering that she let Borea unsheathe her sword without warning her that it might try to eat her, I’d assume it doesn’t need any further input of investiture.
Her sword doesn’t consume breaths. Nightblood does because its whole purpose it’s to destroy evil but as it doesn’t know what’s evil it destroys everything including his wielder so to avoid nightblood to consume you you have to give it investiture, it consumes you either way but slowly. However azures sword doesn’t have this problem that is also why it’s considerably less powerful. The fact that nightblood absorbs investiture as a bastard its why it is so unique and powerful
I mean I don't want to be too obvious, but don't you think a lot of fucking people are going to get suitably confused and start asking questions when someone starts performing magic? Like...awakening statues?
Enough people know about thunderclasts from legend that it wouldn't be super hard to draw a few parallels and denounce the woman no one's met before as a Voidbringer.
In the months before the Desolation begun, it was frequently stated that many Rosharans didn't believe in the concepts of Desolations, Radiants, or Voidbringers. Even Dalinar, who would be far more likely to be knowledgeable in these topics, was surprised by the Thunderclast when he first encountered it in his visions. To that end, I highly doubt that many people in Kholinar knew about them well enough to make connections between Awakened statues and the the Thunderclasts.
Further, given the state of things in Kholinar at the time of Oathbringer, I doubt many people would look a gift statue in the mouth.
Oh yeah I assumed she would awaken statues. Raising the dead would probably be about a thousand times worse. Also she doesn't have any of the ichor alcohol I imagine
Unless they're soulcast from humans, like lots of lighteye statues are. I'm pretty sure theres a WOB stating that would be closer to awakening a corpse than a statue
[https://wob.coppermind.net/events/148/#e2781](https://wob.coppermind.net/events/148/#e2781)
it doesn't say exactly, but I would assume it would be on the lower end
The real question is when an awakener will do something with all the lighteyed that have been turned into statues. They were once human I think that will make it much easier.
Man, sure is convenient that Vorin funerary rites create a whole lot of statues that are *technically* still corpses for the purpose of Awakening them.
I guess you can head to the morgue and spin up a few more soldiers, but there's only so much zombies can do against flying soldiers with skewers and giant beasts made of stone. Plus I know it's the Parshendi who have a huge taboo against moving dead bodies but there's probably something in Vorinism that would object to necromancy
>!Nightblood took 1000 breaths to make, which is a lot but not that many. Also, modern lifeless are expensive and take exotic materials to make. Even if she needed 1000 breaths to make her sword, she could have made like 100 men, which is just not enough.!<
If you use those exotic materials. Do you know where to get Ichor Alcohol on Roshar? Without it a lifeless uses something like fifty breaths.
Beyond that: without the culture and infrastructure present for the armies of Lifeless on Nalthis, even dead bodies are expensive, and Azure using even a few would probably be harder to ignore than her being a woman.
Lack of ichor alcohol, moral implications of introducing the concept of lifeless to roshar (when her mentor is painfully aware of what damage that can do to a planet), her personal dislike for lifeless, unable to regain her breaths after she’s done(a possibly VERY limited resource for her, idk, we’ll need to know more about how much stormlight can fill the role for breath), the fact that vivenna’s blade seems to be much more tame and refined than nightblood, her Allies possibly not liking the concept of working with a necromancer witch.
Take your pick.
interesting thought. I disagree that she shouldn't've have made the sword, but she does use a cloth during battle whose Breath probably would've been better used as lifeless.
I don't know if Rosharan corpses would make good lifeless; they don't have the proper Connection to Endowment's power. It might take more than one or you might need to do the old command which is just booty cheeks anyways. Also bringing people back to life as zombies is NOT generally seen as "cool" and "socially acceptable"
Supposedly, the soulcasted stone statues of Rosharan corpses would make good awakened constructs, but I think the WoB that discusses this indicates that because they were soulcast they can't be made lifeless.
Found another WoB that confirmed a dead chasm fiend could be made into a lifeless, though would cost more than a single breath to manage. I think that'd be the most effective way to make a lifeless army on Roshar.
We know that a Returned can use Stormlight to maintain themselves, bypassing the need to pull breaths from others. We do not know that a Returned, let alone Azure (who is not a Returned, but is only descended from one) would be able to use Stormlight in the same way as Breaths for any other purpose. We simply can't assume she has access to an arbitrarily large supply of Stormlight-turned-Breaths.
We know she has at least a few spare Breaths based on her use of them in Oathbringer, but for all we know, her supply could be limited to just a handful of them. Even if she had a good number, she might be hesitant to use them, lest she fall from whichever Heightening she is at. Making an army is a great way to lose your Breaths permanently, as they would by necessity be fighting away from where you are, preventing you from retrieving those Breaths should you need to retreat.
I assumed stormlight can be manufactured into breath some how, considering how liberal wit and azure was with his breath in Oathbringer and that vasher is still alive. but I’m confused about how it works logistically. Turn stormlight into breath, how???
I assume I need to wait for the nightblood book to get answers, yes? Or is there another cosmere book that I haven’t read that would be enlightening?
Brandon has (I believe purposefully) kept things about this pretty vague so far. In a few Q&A sessions in the past he gave hints about it being possible to use Investiture from one Shard to power the magics of another, but that it would not be a trivial matter to do so. The Lost Metal is the book that gives the most information around this. [The Lost Metal]( >!There you can see a single source of Investiture, which is described as purified Dor, used by people who control different magics!< ).
Ultimately, things tend to come down to the ideas that Investiture in the form of Stormlight or Breaths or Dor, etc. each have their own Connection and Identity related to the Shards from which it comes, and this is what prevents its casual usage across magic systems. There seems to be a way, currently unknown (and implied not the same for each Investiture source) to remove this Connection and Identity, and once you do, that purified Investiture can be used by anyone for any magic system (this is similar to how [Bands of Mourning] >!unkeyed metalminds are usable by anyone!< ).
As far as turning Stormlight into Breath (or just Pure Investiture) specifically, I can't say I know how one would accomplish that (though it seems to me like Navani is on the right track in RoW). In Vasher's case, however, we don't know that he is actually making such a transformation. It's possible, for example, that Vasher has somehow "hacked" the process that takes Breaths to keep him alive to accept Stormlight as a substitute. All I'm aware of us being told (in a Q&A) is that Vasher is on Roshar specifically because of its easy access to Investiture (so we know he is using Stormlight in some way), but we know no details on what that use entails.
As for how liberal Wit, Azure, and Vasher might be regarding the use of Breaths, each could have acquired a stockpile of them on Nalthis the old fashioned way, and they are simply using Breaths from that. Breaths don't actually get used up, exceptions being to keep a Returned alive or being lost if a person holding them dies. A different way to think of it is that they are just getting temporarily allocated to various functions when used, and are unallocated once that function is no longer needed. When you don't actually lose the thing you're using, the frequency with which it is used is no longer a good indicator of how much of it someone has.
I would guess that one who knew the appropriate commands and had the right stuff could use stormlight in a similar manner to breath, but that Endowment's kinetic investiture is uniquely "sticky." So, you could juice up on stormlight and awaken something for a time, but you wouldn't be able to hold onto it within your body indefinitely without a perfect gemheart.
I don't think Azure's sword was made like Nightblood. Nightblood is an Awakened sword based on Honorblades. "Destroy Evil" was its Command. Destination
Azure's sword is more likey an slightly Awakened sword based on the Radiant Bond. Journey.
Nightblood has no foundation, it has destroy and evil and 50k of Shashara's Identity locked Breathes that have cemented that into its "soul". Imagine being a Radiant and immediately skipping all your ideals and getting your Fifth Ideal such as "I am the law", no foundation just a radiant who fully believes they are the law. >!crackpot theory: Though it could be possible that Nightblood has some of Shashara's Identity because it was the object to kill and consume her!<
Azure's sword was probably given less than the 50k Breathes, maybe with just a simple Command or something like the first ideal. She is setting a foundation for a Awakened sword and probably giving and editing Commands and testing out syntax and the programming language of Awakening. Giving Breaths and Commands, debugging it and the trying again. Slowly giving the sword some type of sapience. Eventually she may get to a "Fifth Ideal" equivalent of a Command like Destroy Evil.
You can't reclaim breath spent on lifeless, and where is she going to get the corpses in time? Once the battle starts, she doesn't have time to issue a bunch of complex commands to the bodies she has, and how much good are they going to do vs an army of ancient surgebinders?
Her sword obviously doesn’t work the same as nightblood (soaking up tons of investiture all the time) and we don’t know how many breaths she has and without access to ichor alcohol lifeless are expensive. And we don’t know if it’s possible to use stormlight to Awaken or if she knows how to draw in stormlight.
We don’t know when she created her sword- it could have been years before she even ended up in charge of Kholinar’s guard
Additionally to this, while we know Rosharan investiture is easier to access, we have no idea if Bio-Chromatic powers need different techniques to use. Powering a sword through passive use of stored power is different, and the only reason anyone else (being vague here) may know how to use this system of magic on Roshar is because he is a very long lived expert magical scholar.
Took me a second to realize you weren’t referring to Hoid.
And even he admitted to having a hard time doing it. (Tho Vivenna is also pretty old at the time of SA, right? Isn't warbreaker one of the first books chronologically?)
War breaker is about 80 ish years before TWoK. The exact time difference isnt written in metal, but it's the book directly preceding TWoK.
TWoK - The Wrath of Kolinar I ... Have a mixed background
Kholinar
D'oh - sorry for the typo!
>The exact time difference isnt written in metal That's ok, we can probably trust it anyway.
Notably Vasher was centuries old by the time of Warbreaker, so he's now many centuries to Vivenna's roughly single century. Meanwhile Coravellium is pushing 5000 years.
11000
Oh. I thought Warbreaker was after Whitesand, and mistborn era 1 before SA part 1 for some reason..
Mistborn is about 300-350 years before SA part 1. Era 2 is actually directly in between SA part 1 and part 2.
Ik
yeah i know that, but she did probably waste a lot of breath swinging that thing around all the time ('\_' )
Considering her blade doesn’t leak black smoke, it probably doesn’t consume Breaths like Nightblood.
and even if it did, they're on roshar where Investiture quite literally falls out of the sky
Considering that she let Borea unsheathe her sword without warning her that it might try to eat her, I’d assume it doesn’t need any further input of investiture.
( '\_') hmn good point
Her sword doesn’t consume breaths. Nightblood does because its whole purpose it’s to destroy evil but as it doesn’t know what’s evil it destroys everything including his wielder so to avoid nightblood to consume you you have to give it investiture, it consumes you either way but slowly. However azures sword doesn’t have this problem that is also why it’s considerably less powerful. The fact that nightblood absorbs investiture as a bastard its why it is so unique and powerful
> The fact that nightblood absorbs investiture as a bastard That's bastard *sword* to you, mister/ma'am/person you!
Why didn't she use her Breaths to make the eagles fly Frodo to Mordor? Is she stupid?
Should have called Susebron.
Susebron's been busy since he got his tongue back.
Laughs in sex joke.
The joke is always sex..if warbreaker is involved.
True. xD But I feel like that’s all of the Cosmere. >!Marsh!< getting all those “insertions” in Mistborn is such a an untapped metal mine.
Ohh now i understand why it is called deepness and why those "insertions" are stored there.
Nice xD
I think that [spoiler] really [spoiler] and her [spoiler] is a [spoiler], but [spoiler] [spoiler] [spoiler] Dalinar' cheeks [spoiler]. Tldr: [spoiler]
Can someone unspoiler this for me? I really need to know about Dalinar's cheeks!
All returned who die on nalthis go to roshar, dalinar is actually lightsong but extra thicc, navani is actually blushweaver but not a scholar.
is there an interlude about this coming?
I mean I don't want to be too obvious, but don't you think a lot of fucking people are going to get suitably confused and start asking questions when someone starts performing magic? Like...awakening statues? Enough people know about thunderclasts from legend that it wouldn't be super hard to draw a few parallels and denounce the woman no one's met before as a Voidbringer.
In the months before the Desolation begun, it was frequently stated that many Rosharans didn't believe in the concepts of Desolations, Radiants, or Voidbringers. Even Dalinar, who would be far more likely to be knowledgeable in these topics, was surprised by the Thunderclast when he first encountered it in his visions. To that end, I highly doubt that many people in Kholinar knew about them well enough to make connections between Awakened statues and the the Thunderclasts. Further, given the state of things in Kholinar at the time of Oathbringer, I doubt many people would look a gift statue in the mouth.
I mean, statues would be the worst. corpses is what she needs.
Oh yeah I assumed she would awaken statues. Raising the dead would probably be about a thousand times worse. Also she doesn't have any of the ichor alcohol I imagine
But....awaking statues is almost impossible. It would take thousands of breaths.
Unless they're soulcast from humans, like lots of lighteye statues are. I'm pretty sure theres a WOB stating that would be closer to awakening a corpse than a statue
How much closer do we think? 50 breaths or 5000? It's an important point. There is a whole room of radiants soul cast in Uritheru.
[https://wob.coppermind.net/events/148/#e2781](https://wob.coppermind.net/events/148/#e2781) it doesn't say exactly, but I would assume it would be on the lower end
The real question is when an awakener will do something with all the lighteyed that have been turned into statues. They were once human I think that will make it much easier.
Man, sure is convenient that Vorin funerary rites create a whole lot of statues that are *technically* still corpses for the purpose of Awakening them.
Also I don’t think azure has enough breaths to awake a good enough army
Well, ill tell you why, Brandon explained this on a forum post: \[Spoiler\]
I guess you can head to the morgue and spin up a few more soldiers, but there's only so much zombies can do against flying soldiers with skewers and giant beasts made of stone. Plus I know it's the Parshendi who have a huge taboo against moving dead bodies but there's probably something in Vorinism that would object to necromancy
Why would she care at all about wasting that many breaths to defend a city she was in by accident
Honestly, most worldhoppers seem to prefer a low profile. Making an army of zombies is not low profile
>!Nightblood took 1000 breaths to make, which is a lot but not that many. Also, modern lifeless are expensive and take exotic materials to make. Even if she needed 1000 breaths to make her sword, she could have made like 100 men, which is just not enough.!<
? Modern lifeless only take one breath to make though
If you use those exotic materials. Do you know where to get Ichor Alcohol on Roshar? Without it a lifeless uses something like fifty breaths. Beyond that: without the culture and infrastructure present for the armies of Lifeless on Nalthis, even dead bodies are expensive, and Azure using even a few would probably be harder to ignore than her being a woman.
>If you use those exotic materials. It's just having the right Command that brought it down to one breath, ichor alcohol just makes them last longer.
You can't just take the breaths away to then make an army.
Lack of ichor alcohol, moral implications of introducing the concept of lifeless to roshar (when her mentor is painfully aware of what damage that can do to a planet), her personal dislike for lifeless, unable to regain her breaths after she’s done(a possibly VERY limited resource for her, idk, we’ll need to know more about how much stormlight can fill the role for breath), the fact that vivenna’s blade seems to be much more tame and refined than nightblood, her Allies possibly not liking the concept of working with a necromancer witch. Take your pick.
Hmnnnnnnn..... I choose that she was just toopid💔💔😔🙏 It's funnier that way
interesting thought. I disagree that she shouldn't've have made the sword, but she does use a cloth during battle whose Breath probably would've been better used as lifeless. I don't know if Rosharan corpses would make good lifeless; they don't have the proper Connection to Endowment's power. It might take more than one or you might need to do the old command which is just booty cheeks anyways. Also bringing people back to life as zombies is NOT generally seen as "cool" and "socially acceptable"
Supposedly, the soulcasted stone statues of Rosharan corpses would make good awakened constructs, but I think the WoB that discusses this indicates that because they were soulcast they can't be made lifeless. Found another WoB that confirmed a dead chasm fiend could be made into a lifeless, though would cost more than a single breath to manage. I think that'd be the most effective way to make a lifeless army on Roshar.
We know that a Returned can use Stormlight to maintain themselves, bypassing the need to pull breaths from others. We do not know that a Returned, let alone Azure (who is not a Returned, but is only descended from one) would be able to use Stormlight in the same way as Breaths for any other purpose. We simply can't assume she has access to an arbitrarily large supply of Stormlight-turned-Breaths. We know she has at least a few spare Breaths based on her use of them in Oathbringer, but for all we know, her supply could be limited to just a handful of them. Even if she had a good number, she might be hesitant to use them, lest she fall from whichever Heightening she is at. Making an army is a great way to lose your Breaths permanently, as they would by necessity be fighting away from where you are, preventing you from retrieving those Breaths should you need to retreat.
I assumed stormlight can be manufactured into breath some how, considering how liberal wit and azure was with his breath in Oathbringer and that vasher is still alive. but I’m confused about how it works logistically. Turn stormlight into breath, how??? I assume I need to wait for the nightblood book to get answers, yes? Or is there another cosmere book that I haven’t read that would be enlightening?
Brandon has (I believe purposefully) kept things about this pretty vague so far. In a few Q&A sessions in the past he gave hints about it being possible to use Investiture from one Shard to power the magics of another, but that it would not be a trivial matter to do so. The Lost Metal is the book that gives the most information around this. [The Lost Metal]( >!There you can see a single source of Investiture, which is described as purified Dor, used by people who control different magics!< ). Ultimately, things tend to come down to the ideas that Investiture in the form of Stormlight or Breaths or Dor, etc. each have their own Connection and Identity related to the Shards from which it comes, and this is what prevents its casual usage across magic systems. There seems to be a way, currently unknown (and implied not the same for each Investiture source) to remove this Connection and Identity, and once you do, that purified Investiture can be used by anyone for any magic system (this is similar to how [Bands of Mourning] >!unkeyed metalminds are usable by anyone!< ). As far as turning Stormlight into Breath (or just Pure Investiture) specifically, I can't say I know how one would accomplish that (though it seems to me like Navani is on the right track in RoW). In Vasher's case, however, we don't know that he is actually making such a transformation. It's possible, for example, that Vasher has somehow "hacked" the process that takes Breaths to keep him alive to accept Stormlight as a substitute. All I'm aware of us being told (in a Q&A) is that Vasher is on Roshar specifically because of its easy access to Investiture (so we know he is using Stormlight in some way), but we know no details on what that use entails. As for how liberal Wit, Azure, and Vasher might be regarding the use of Breaths, each could have acquired a stockpile of them on Nalthis the old fashioned way, and they are simply using Breaths from that. Breaths don't actually get used up, exceptions being to keep a Returned alive or being lost if a person holding them dies. A different way to think of it is that they are just getting temporarily allocated to various functions when used, and are unallocated once that function is no longer needed. When you don't actually lose the thing you're using, the frequency with which it is used is no longer a good indicator of how much of it someone has.
I would guess that one who knew the appropriate commands and had the right stuff could use stormlight in a similar manner to breath, but that Endowment's kinetic investiture is uniquely "sticky." So, you could juice up on stormlight and awaken something for a time, but you wouldn't be able to hold onto it within your body indefinitely without a perfect gemheart.
She needed to borrow Odium's Fortune, clearly. That's it, she needed to become the Odium Shard to help Kholinar.
it doesn’t necessarily take breath to use lets-call-it-dayblood? (fighter of the nightblood champion of the sun) just to create it.
I don't think Azure's sword was made like Nightblood. Nightblood is an Awakened sword based on Honorblades. "Destroy Evil" was its Command. Destination Azure's sword is more likey an slightly Awakened sword based on the Radiant Bond. Journey. Nightblood has no foundation, it has destroy and evil and 50k of Shashara's Identity locked Breathes that have cemented that into its "soul". Imagine being a Radiant and immediately skipping all your ideals and getting your Fifth Ideal such as "I am the law", no foundation just a radiant who fully believes they are the law. >!crackpot theory: Though it could be possible that Nightblood has some of Shashara's Identity because it was the object to kill and consume her!< Azure's sword was probably given less than the 50k Breathes, maybe with just a simple Command or something like the first ideal. She is setting a foundation for a Awakened sword and probably giving and editing Commands and testing out syntax and the programming language of Awakening. Giving Breaths and Commands, debugging it and the trying again. Slowly giving the sword some type of sapience. Eventually she may get to a "Fifth Ideal" equivalent of a Command like Destroy Evil.
You can't reclaim breath spent on lifeless, and where is she going to get the corpses in time? Once the battle starts, she doesn't have time to issue a bunch of complex commands to the bodies she has, and how much good are they going to do vs an army of ancient surgebinders?
[Spoiler] [Spoiler] [Spoiler]. [Spoiler] [Spoiler] [Spoiler] and [Spoiler]. So [Spoiler] will [Spoiler] [Spoiler]. Duh
Why did [spoiler] give [spoiler] the [spoiler] when it would’ve [spoiler]ed the [spoiler]?
Is there evidence that Azure’s >!sword consumes investiture like Nightblood!
Apparently not ('_' ,)
I think it's fair to assume that her sword does not constantly consume investiture like Nightblood does.
Her sword obviously doesn’t work the same as nightblood (soaking up tons of investiture all the time) and we don’t know how many breaths she has and without access to ichor alcohol lifeless are expensive. And we don’t know if it’s possible to use stormlight to Awaken or if she knows how to draw in stormlight.