Gavilar's Sphere and Refined Investiture

[Pagerunner]

With the latest RoW chapter, we finally got an answer to what Gavilar had in his mysterious black spheres. It was, indeed Voidlight. I had been pretty solidly in the Voidlight camp for quite a long while; the prologue made me flip over to imprisoned Voidspren, but Chapter Thirteen and this most recent one got me back. Shame on me for doubting myself.

But, though it is an answer, it is not the entirety of the answer. Because Gavilar had more than just one kind of sphere. You may have been wondering facetiously, “If Voidlight is so good, how come Odium never made Voidlight 2?” But it turns out, that just may be what we got in Chapter Sixteen. Relevant passages from this chapter:

Navani:

Quote

Navani held up the dark sphere, closing one eye to inspect it closely. It was different from Voidlight. She held up a Voidlight sphere for comparison, a diamond infused with the strange Light gathered during the Everstorm.

They still didn’t know how the enemy infused spheres with Voidlight; all they owned were stolen from the singers. Fortunately, Voidlight leaked far more slowly than Stormlight did. She probably had a few more days before this one went dun.

The Voidlight sphere had a strange glow to it. A distinctive purple-on-black, which Rushu described as a hyperviolet—a color she claimed existed in theory, though Navani didn’t know how a color could be theoretical. Regardless, this was a purple-on-black, coexisting in such a way that both shades simultaneously occupied the same space.

The strange sphere that Szeth had provided seemed exactly the same at first glance. Purple upon black, an impossible color. Like the ordinary Voidlight sphere, its blackness expanded, making the surrounding air dim.

But there was an added effect with this sphere, one she hadn’t noticed right away. It warped the air around it. Looking at the sphere for too long was a distinctively disorienting sensation. It evoked a wrongness that she couldn’t define.

Gavilar had possessed Voidlight spheres—she remembered seeing them—and that fact was befuddling enough. How had her husband obtained Voidlight years before the arrival of the Everstorm? But this other black sphere. What on Roshar was it?

Szeth:

Quote

“He spoke a few names, which I do not remember, asking if those men had sent me. When I assured him they had not, he was relieved. I think he feared the sphere falling into their hands, so he gave it to me. He trusted his own murderer more than those who surrounded him.”

Nem the Jeweler:

Quote

“Practically flawless,” Nem said, clamping the sphere in some small grips. “This wasn’t grown as a gemheart, I can tell you that. The structure would never align so perfectly. This sphere is worth thousands, Brightness. It will probably hold Stormlight for months without leaking any out. Maybe years. Longer, for Voidlight.”

“It was left in a cave for over six years,” Navani said. “And was glowing—or whatever you call that blackness—the same when it was retrieved.”

“Quite strange indeed,” Talnah said. “What an odd sphere, Brightness. That must be Voidlight, but it feels wrong. I mean, it’s black-violet like others I’ve seen, but…”

“The air warps around it,” Navani said.

Rlain:

Quote

As she waited, Navani puttered in her notebooks, theorizing about Gavilar’s dark sphere. She flipped to a testimonial she’d transcribed from Rlain, the listener member of Bridge Four. He swore that Gavilar had given his general, Eshonai, a Voidlight sphere years before the coming of the Everstorm. When Navani showed him this second sphere, his reaction had been curious.

I don’t know what that is, Brightness, he’d said. But it feels painful. Voidlight is dangerously inviting, like if I touched it, my body would drink it in eagerly. That thing… is different. It has a song I’ve never heard, and it vibrates wrong against my soul.

So, there’s something different about this Voidlight (and, yes, I’m going to keep calling it Voidlight for the time being, since it has the same color and it came from the same source [Gavilar] as other Voidlight spheres).

 

Taking a step back and looking at the big picture, what was Gavilar trying to accomplish with this Voidlight? Excerpts below from the prologue and from Mraize’s lore dump

Gavilar:

Quote

“…Being able to bring them back and forth from Braize doesn’t mean anything,” one said. “It’s too close to be a relevant distance.”

“It was impossible only a few short years ago,” said a deep, powerful voice. Gavilar. “This is proof. The Connection is not severed, and the box allows for travel. Not yet as far as you’d like, but we must start the journey somewhere.”

Mraize:

Quote

Mraize took the broam back. “This gemstone cannot go where it is needed. A more perfect gemstone could contain the Light long enough to go offworld, but there is still the Connection problem. This little flaw has caused untold trouble. And the one who unlocks the secret would have untold power. Literal power, Radiant. The power to change worlds…”

…

“But Gavilar… what did he truly want? Immortality, in part. He thought he could become like the Heralds. In his quest, he discovered a secret. He had Voidlight before the Everstorm—he carried it from Braize, the place you call Damnation. He was testing the movement of Light between worlds. And one close to him might have answers. At any rate, we couldn’t risk Ialai or the Sons of Honor recovering these secrets.”

So, Gavilar was working with the Heralds to try to overcome the "Connection Problem." His test subjects were Voidlight spheres; I had assumed that he needed actual Invested Entities like spren (which was why I had flipped briefly to the Voidspren camp), but we have since learned that Stormlight and Voidlight themselves have the same Connection limitations. (Which is a little surprising to me, since I thought the Dor being trapped on Sel was a specific function of those Shards’ state, seeing how Awakening and Allomancy and Aviars and whatever ghost gun Nazh had in the Mistborn broadsheets all function perfectly well off-world. But that’s a question for another time.) There were two core problems that Gavilar/the Heralds/the Ghostbloods needed to learn to overcome: how to keep the Investiture from leaking out of its storage containers, and how to remove the Connection inhibitions.

Gavilar apparently succeeded at the first. The mystery sphere is noted to have few to no imperfections. Where he got it from is another minor mystery, but I presume it was from spren in Shadesmar or a growth fabrial or something. Nothing too earth-shattering.

However, I think he has also succeeded at the second.

Some form of modification or corruption that changed the nature of the Voidlight, refining it and allowing it to be taken off-world or used in other magic systems. The two people he was worried about killing him for it, Thaidakar and Restares, were both looking for the same answer: the Ghostbloods for their mercantile aspirations, Restares as Gavilar’s compatriot.

 

This is not the first hint we’ve seen of refined Investiture. It’s mentioned on the Hemalurgy table, of course; atium Hemalurgy only steals any powers if it has been refined. But we’ve also got a number of WoBs over the years about this concept. I have added emphasis:

Quote

Badger1289

If investiture can’t be moved beyond a certain point away from its world/solar system, how in the Cosmere did three awakeners end up on Roshar?

Brandon Sanderson

Investiture from different systems acts in different ways. Certain people have managed, for example, to get some kinds of Investiture to leave their home world through the use of a kind of magical pipeline. Breaths attach to the identity of the individual, and are fully given away--freely, which removes some of this Connection. It's a nature of Endowment that the gift is given without strings attached, so to speak. But while it's a renewable resource, it's a difficult one.

Roshar is extra "sticky" so to speak with investiture. It's part of the nature of Honor, Cultivation, and oaths. So getting it off is a problem, though collecting it is not.

Echono

Wouldn't consuming it also be a problem? You need a direct or secondary Bond to take in Stormlight investiture. It's not like metals or Breaths that anyone could absorb. Although a certain grouchy ardent might have found a way...

Brandon Sanderson

You are right in that Stormlight is more being seen as a power source, since certain systems in the cosmere can work on a variety of different kinds. Not just anyone could make use of it, at least not unless it is refined.

General Reddit 2020 (Oct. 8, 2020)

Quote

Ilkhan2016

Breath and Stormlight are both forms of Investiture. AFAIK you can power any of the magic systems from any form of Investiture. Zahel is on Roshar, I believe, primarily due to how easy Investiture (Stormlight) is to come across.

AFAIK the form of Investiture doesn't change anything about the abilities. For example, Szeth was sucked out of Stormlight when he drew Nightblood; and Azure used Stormlight to Awaken in Shadesmar.

/u/mistborn is that right?

Brandon Sanderson

A lot of this depends on the Investiture and the magic in question. Azure was legit using Breaths, for example--ones she'd brought with her. But Szeth was able to feed Stormlight to Nightblood, much as Vasher uses Stormlight to keep himself alive.

To Awaken with Stormlight, the easiest thing to do would be to first change Stormlight into Breaths--something that Azure doesn't know how to do. (Admittedly, Hoid doesn't either, so it's not like it's a simple thing to achieve.) You could also theoretically use some magical (or mechanical) means to power your Awakening with a different form of Investiture.

Extesian

This is very interesting. Is it possible then in the Cosmere for the 'intent' (spin or however described) of Investiture to be changed? And I mean within reasonable limits (not the powers of six shards or any of that). Can a Shard effectively grow in power in a place (e.g. toward an avatar) through another Shard's Investiture being changed (not just corrupted)? Or is it just making one type ('intent' - you should canonize a word for this :D) of Investiture mimic the properties of another?

Brandon Sanderson

Most of the ways of accomplishing what you're talking about would involve either 1) fooling/overwriting your spiritual makeup somehow. (This is what Hemalurgy does, for example.) 2) Refining the power somehow into a more pure form.

But there are a lot of variables. The way magic from Nalthis works, for example, the system is just looking for any available Investiture to power itself--and so basically anything will do, regardless of the source. This includes consuming your own soul, in some cases...

You'll see terminology coming along eventually that facilitates talking about all of this. I'm not yet decided on some of it.

Celestial_Blu3

How many Breaths does [Azure] have by her final appearance in OB?

Brandon Sanderson

That's a RAFO, I'm afraid.

General Reddit 2019 (April 25, 2019)

Quote

Brandon Sanderson

So one of the things people have been asking about a lot the nature of Identity and its uses for accessing other people's metalminds, and things like this right. And I hedged a little bit when somebody asked me... *inaudible*...send people into spirals of confusion, so I'm gonna clarify it for now. So, someone comes in and says, we need a blank metalmind, anybody can use that. I'm like, yes but, the reason that it's a hedge is that you need to actually be a feruchemist to access it, right, you can't just hold the blank metalmind not being a feruchemist, even though it's somebody else's investiture that's been blanked, right. So people keep kind of missing this thing. I'm hedging in the sort of, you don't quite have it, I've kind of dodged it, but I worry that it's just going to be confusing.

So the issue is, you need two things from one of these. You need something that makes you a feruchemist, and then you need a metalmind that somebody else has filled with blank investiture, ok. Now if you can get pure investiture, that can be used by anybody, regardless, ok, you need it in pure form though. But, so there are some other tricks with this as well that don't make it...so anyway, you've got a couple of things that can go on. So you've got a blank metalmind, right, with nothing. You need either investiture, to be able...like you need to be the right type. There are ways to access that if you are completely blank also, if you were a blank slate, but that is still...kind of hard. It's even harder if you are blank, and the metalmind is not blank, but that's not what they're doing in Mistborn right now. You are tapping investiture, gaining the ability of feruchemy and then you are drawing out a blank metalmind, ok. That's the one you need to be...and everything else I'm hedging on intentionally, and I'm worried I hedged in a way that made it sound confusing, ok. So you know now what they're doing. You know that there are other things possible. But I don't want you to think that you have the explanations for how all those things happen, ok.

Arcanum Unbounded Seattle signing (Dec. 1, 2016)

These are hints that refined or purified Investiture transcends the limits that are normally inherent to it. Stormlight is normally only tied to Rosharan magics; but if you can refine it, anyone can use it. I’m still fuzzy on what unrefined atium does in Hemalurgy, but refined atium has no limitations on what it can steal. Refined Investiture in a nicrosil metalminds lets the metalmind be accessed by anybody, not just a nicrosil Feruchemist.

And even outside of Invested Arts applications, other limitations can be overcome, as well. Connection of Investiture to a planetary system. Possibly even the Investiture interference principle, which could explain why atium beads can be Pushed and Pulled.

 

Now, this idea is still pretty open-ended; we do have the vast majority of a new book coming, and some early hints are that this concept will be explored pretty heavily, what with the cover being main characters outside the fortress where Restares lives with a secret mission from Mraize and the Ghostbloods to learn what he knows. So I don’t really have any guesses as to how Investiture gets refined. But I’m betting that Gavilar’s mystery sphere with Voidlight 2 is going to be a culmination of these plotlines and something they will learn how to replicate. For better or worse.

I am making an intentional decision to put this theory out before the Chapter Sixteen annotation comes out. After all this mystery around the black spheres, and this latest chapter ratcheting it up another notch, I don’t expect that an annotation will be providing us any answers on this subject. We’ll tomorrow if I’m right on that count or not.

Edited October 20, 2020 by Pagerunner

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine]

44 minutes ago, Pagerunner said:

These are hints that refined or purified Investiture transcends the limits that are normally inherent to it. Stormlight is normally only tied to Rosharan magics; but if you can refine it, anyone can use it.

This is a very interesting theory, and the idea of Investiture refinement making it a universally usable and transportable source of power is very intriguing.

If this is the case, that the black sphere that Gavilar gave to Szeth contains some type of advanced refined form of investiture that Gavilar was worried would fall into Restares' or Thaidakar's hands, it implies that the secret of the refinement should be evident from the sphere itself, or that the secret of the refinement could be reverse engineered from the sphere.

This leads me to the speculation that the secret might be as simple as the black sphere is just aperfect gem infused with the 3 flavors of investiture on Roshar, namely Voidlight, Stormlight, and Cultivationlight (or maybe just Voidlight and Stormlight).

We've gotten hints in the preview chapters (including the Syl Interlude so the rest of this thought is spoilered)

Spoiler

that the Tower runs on all three types of Investiture. Syl describes it glowing with a strange but familiar light (voidlight possibly), the tower adjusts environmental conditions in preparation for the highstorm and looks to have features setup to use stormlight directly, and the terraced gardens for growing crops heavily imply that Cultivation's magic is also used at the tower. The lifesprenn+rhythm+gemheart crop growing technique might to be one of our first glimpses of Cultivation's magic fueled partially by stormlight.

My guess is that refining Investiture means combining Investiture to get a form closer to the original state of Investiture, pre-shattering. This would explain Mraize's trophy case and Hoid's quest for invested arts, possibly by combining multiple forms of Investiture the geographic Connection of each flavor of Investiture is weakened.

Maybe the stepped advances in transport distance of the spheres that Gavilar talks about were due to infusing the perfect sphere with Voidlight and Stormlight, and the final refinement, allowing the sphere to be taken even further was the additional infusion of Cultivationlight. The fact that Rlain hears a strange song from the sphere that is out of synch with his soul might be the effect of the various spins of investiture fighting against each other.

The only times we've seen noticeable warping effects are when heavily invested entities are present (Nightblood, the God King, and maybe I'm misrembering this but I don't have the OB ebook, when Dalinar combined the 3 realms). This would imply that the sphere is heavily infused with Investiture. And further might be a hint at the means of achieving this, through the powers unique to the Bondsmiths.

This is a lot of conjecture to be sure, but the fact that Gavilar had access to Voidlight at all implies that he was working with one of the two entities known to be capable of supplying it, either Odium or BAM. Out of the two, I'm inclined to think he was working with BAM, and that she somehow used her Bondsmith-like power of Connection to enable the overloading of the black sphere. Possibly it was a perfect gem that first was infused with Stormlight that she then infused with Voidlight. 

If BAM was instrumental in hyper-infusing the black sphere it would also explain the Ghostbloods' interest in the Unmade. Perhaps the investigations into Re-Shephir, and Sja-Anat are preliminary investigations to aquire the skills necessary to control possibly the most valuable of the Unmade, namely BAM.

First you get the spheres, then you get the Unmade, and then you get the power.

[+Bzhydack]

48 minutes ago, hoiditthroughthegrapevine said:

Spoiler

that the Tower runs on all three types of Investiture. Syl describes it glowing with a strange but familiar light (voidlight possibly),

 

Every time in books when Spren is describing power of Odium, is described as "wrong", even by Glys who is partialy voidish. Never "Familiar". This can be Cultivationlight (Growlight?), considering that Urithiru is basicly above The Valey. Cmon, green lights will look strange ;-)

Also, this sphere is similar to Nightblood in one more thing - causes feel bad, if someone looks long enough. My first impresion was that this is not "pure" Investiture, but more with shifted Intent - like someone change it to Ruin. Like it was in Nightblood case too. We know that Ruin deasnt care where destruction happens, also has probably only Cosmere magic without Connection. So after all, this is what Gavilar wants.

56 minutes ago, hoiditthroughthegrapevine said:

The only times we've seen noticeable warping effects are when heavily invested entities are present (Nightblood, the God King, and maybe I'm misrembering this but I don't have the OB ebook, when Dalinar combined the 3 realms). This would imply that the sphere is heavily infused with Investiture. And further might be a hint at the means of achieving this, through the powers unique to the Bondsmiths.

Also, when someone is bonded to Yelig-Nar.

[Karger]

6 hours ago, Pagerunner said:

Rlain:

Ulim came from somewhere.  Eshonai may have thought that it was just voidlight but it strikes me that a certain sister with more curiosity then good sense who was in a position to study the sphere might have done a much more thorough investigation.  Rlian also does NOT know about Ulim or Venli's treachery.  I am actually a little confused as to why it must be either an unmade or fused. 

Edited October 21, 2020 by Karger

[Lemiltock]

I think from what Rlain its not likley to be refined investitute, maybe transformed (ruin has been mentioned) if not a fussed. Specifically i think the "vibrates wrong against my soul" part.

Quote

I don’t know what that is, Brightness, he’d said. But it feels painful. Voidlight is dangerously inviting, like if I touched it, my body would drink it in eagerly. That thing… is different. It has a song I’ve never heard, and it vibrates wrong against my soul.