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 – 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.)

Vasher: What?

Shashara: You know how fantasy books talk about swords “forged from the blood of enemies”? Well, I calculated it, and you would have to drain the blood of 400 adult men and extract the iron from their blood to have enough to make a steel longsword. Forged from the blood of your enemies.

Vasher: That’s pretty neat.