Navani makes an interesting discovery in Rhythm of War: while Intention is needed to produce an anti-tone, the person playing it does NOT need Intent so long as the person creating the tool used to produce the sound had it when manufacturing it. This Intent requirement brings to mind something else in the Cosmere тАУ Hemalurgy. Hemalurgy requires Intent to create a spike, on the part of the stabber or someone else involved.[1] This got me wondering, can one create a metal with the Intention of it being used as a Hemalurgic spike, without the person using it knowing? And then I had another thought from there...
Have we already seen this?
Specifically, my mind went to the mystery of why Nightblood contains Ruin's Investiture.[2] An interesting thing with Hemalurgy is that it can be done by anyone with the right knowledge, no extra power required. We also know that some of the Scholars had visited worlds that had gone through the Industrial Revolution and had a more developed sense of scientific theory.[3] Scadrial's tech level pre-TFE was apparently "early industrial era", so it's possible that it was the place they saw, and perhaps they picked up knowledge of Hemalurgy, since it was known in Alendi's time.[4] (Note that I do not mean to say they visited pre-Ascension, just at a point where some things were still more widely-known in certain more Cosmere-aware circles than by Vin's time.)
Now, we know that Nightblood was not originally a spike.[5] So I'm not suggesting that. But there's a key word there: originally. What if it's an object like what I speculate above, a piece of metal imbued with the Intent to rip off a piece of the soul of everything it attacks, but given a mind of its own and an incredible amount of Investiture to supercharge this effect and rip the whole damn thing out? (We know that larkin, Leechers, and Nightblood all work off roughly the same mechanics, so whatever it's doing, sucking Investiture from the soul seems to be a key part.[6]) That would explain how Ruin's power got in there, as well as explaining why it behaves very differently from anything else we've seen Awakened objects be able to do, and demonstrates a much more subtle yet terrifying way to mix various magics than something like Compounding.
