Vessels in Aether of Night

[Pagerunner]

Been looking at this thread. I don't think we have a canon answer. But, I think we see that exact instance in Aether of Night, of powerful Splinters having their own Vessels.

The way I understand the Shards of Aether, there is Decay (a proto-Ruin), Formation (The Former, a proto-Preservation, the Shard behind the Aethers), and Chaos and Order (two powerful Splinters of Formation). One Splinter was given to each of the Fell Twins, and they took on their new names based on actions, not on Shardic intent (Slaughter and Despair).

When the Fell Twins were trapped, it appears that the bulk of their Investiture was drawn out of the Spiritual Realm and placed into the Physical Realm in the form of a Shardpool. These probably aren't true Perpendicularities; I suspect they're more analogous to Shardblades, where they're just a straight-up physical embodiment of a Splinter, and you can't use them to worldhop (and those executed in the Pool of the Forgotten were, indeed, executed).

I make the Vessel connection because their bodies were removed from the Physical Realm, and later returned, exactly as we've seen with Vessels of Shards. I think, to have a Vessel, a piece of Investiture needs to be able to accommodate a human's entire Physical form being converted to Investiture and stored in the Splinter, which would set a lower limit on what Splinters could have a Vessel. I think the presence of a mind already there will also prevent a Vessel, since that 'slot' is already occupied by a natural manifestation of the Splinter.

So, Honorblades aren't big enough. Superspren (Unmade, Stormfather) already have minds. The Well of Ascension isn't a Splinter, it's a Perpendicularity. There's nothing in the published canon that could support a Vessel. But I think we did see it in Aether, and I think the realmatics of Aether have no contradiction with canon (even if the specific events in it did not occur in the cosmere), so I think it's a possibility.

Any other thoughts? I don't think I want to mention any of this over in the original thread I linked, since even mentioning that there's relevant info in an unpublished book seems to violate the unpublished discussion rules.

[Weltall]

My two sphere's worth: I'm not sure Brandon's system of exactly how Shards work was completely formalized when Aether was written so we might want to take some things with a pinch of salt. Especially as pretty much everything in the work is subject to change whenever Brandon rewrites it.

The way I remember things and with some interpretation, the Former and Decay are definitely proto-Preservation and Ruin, the latter being explicitly confirmed and the former an obvious extrapolation. I don't think that Order and Chaos are Splinters of the Former though, the impression I got from the prologue is that they're natural forces the Twins were able to tap into. Agaris describes Order as 'the very substance of the universe' and since his 'pure' Aether (Illuminous) was the one that supposedly represented Order, it would be strange to have him literally be restrained by his own power, ditto Makkal with Chaos. And in terms of power levels, even if Agaris was exaggerating somewhat the implication that it was within his power to actually destroy planets puts the Twins on the same level as Shards, like Ruin or Odium. So I'm not sure we can really use them as baselines for 'a Splinter able to hypothetically have a Vessel' since they really behave more like Shards that just happen to not be the most powerful things around.

As far as the Realmatics go, the Twins definitely behave like Vessels with their bodies returning at the end but we probably shouldn't read too much into that because of both the power-level thing above and because Agaris' introduction makes it seem like they retained their physical bodies with their powers originally (ie, not like what happened to Vin and Sazed upon Ascension) and it was only because of Decay that they were cut off from the Physical, as a late development.