Where does surge binding come from?

[knightedbishop]

Where did surge binding come from, and how was it accessed prior to the Honorblades and the nahel bond?
 

I thought I remember magic systems are linked to the planets, and the while the shards can tweak the magic system in ways, their real influence is on how the system is accessed. I know Honor created the Honorblades, and that each gave access to two of the surges. I know the spren are mimicking what Honor did with the blades and access to the surges via the nahel bond. So was there surge binding on Roshar before Honor and Cultivation arrived, and they tweaked it when they invested in the planet? 
 

When Honor goes mad, he raves that the knights will destroy Roshar, just like they did Ashlyn. We know the original humans came from Ashlyn as refuges after some sort of cataclysm, and the assumption is that unbound surge binding led to the disaster. But how were the human on Ashlyn accessing surges if not through Honor, Honorblades, or nahel bonds? And why does the magic system we know about on Ashlyn at the moment seem totally different to surge binding (magic given based on disease)?

All this leaves me confused. Where did surgebinding originate? How was it originally accessed? Anyone know?

[Weltall]

The Surges are natural to the greater Rosharan System, which is why all the magics there manipulate them in some way. We don't know exactly how the humans of Ashyn accessed them but they obviously had some means of doing so. We also know that the reason Surgebinding via spren bond couldn't happen before the Shattering is because Adonalsium didn't allow it.

Quote

Pod (paraphrased)

You said at the Starsight release that [Adonalsium] was intentionally preventing the spren from accessing Surges through fabrials and such pre-Shattering. Was this a passive or active effect?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

It was kind of both - the way [Adonalsium] worked was just that the way he saw the world [magic] was the way the world [magic] worked. He didn't want the spren to be able to do that, so they couldn't.

American Fork High School Signing (Dec. 12, 2019)

Basically, the Surges are fundamental forces (or the perception of them) which exist in the system and that means that they've always been there. Post-Shattering the restriction that Adonalsium had imposed was gone so there were probably more avenues to experiment with them than before. Also, not to put too fine a point on it but... Odium was involved with the cataclysm on Ashyn in some way. It's quite likely that the humans were able to access the Surges through some mechanism he set up.

Ashyn's disease-based magic is still manipulating the Surges (the cities are being held aloft with gravity manipulation for example) but they being accessed differently now than they were before. It's likely that the shift is due to Ashyn not having a Shard 'in residence' meaning that access to magic has shifted to something more indirect/environmental. Strength of and access to magic is one of the big dividing lines between a 'major shardworld' like Roshar and a 'minor' one like Ashyn or First of the Sun.

Edited December 11, 2020 by Ookla the Crimson King

[Eternal Khol]

22 minutes ago, Ookla the Crimson King said:

It's likely that the shift is due to Ashyn not having a Shard 'in residence' meaning that access to magic has shifted to something more indirect/environmental.

Was Odium ever "in residence"? Was he even there long enough to create/affect a magic system?

At this point he probably didnt know how long he was gonna be on the Rosharan system or that hed get trapped for 7000 years and wouldnt want to invest in anything

do we even know that if a shard shows up(not long enough to invest in the place)and leaves that it affects the magic system?

Edited December 11, 2020 by Eternal Khol
Typos

[Weltall]

1 hour ago, Eternal Khol said:

Was Odium ever "in residence"? Was he even there long enough to create/affect a magic system?

At this point he probably didnt know how long he was gonna be on the Rosharan system or that hed get trapped for 7000 years and wouldnt want to invest in anything

Shards can reclaim the power they've Invested in a planet, it's just 'difficult'. Since he was involved in some way with Ashyn and seems to have used the cataclysm there as Step One in his plans to go after Honor and Cultivation, it's possible he'd see it as worth the effort and deliberately Invested a small amount of his power for the purpose of giving humanity the means to cause an Ashyn-shattering kaboom, but not enough that it would be prohibitively difficult to take that power back later.

Alternatively it's entirely possible that humans had sufficient means of interacting with the magic already and Odium just... encouraged them to do things with it that they probably shouldn't have. Dawnshards were apparently involved per the Stormfather in OB. It could go either way really.

Edited December 11, 2020 by Ookla the Crimson King