A salute to Auxiliary

[strmblsd he/him]

I salute you aux

[Diomedes]

On 10/2/2023 at 4:42 PM, robardin said:

I am the leftover strength of oaths sworn. I am the truth you once knew. ...

I will burn away only myself, my personality. That should leave you with my body, the weapon, to still use. This is my destination, not yours.

You don't get to decide. I know about consequences.  ... I also swore to be better than I was. I became a Knight Radiant. I spoke the words.

And whatever you did, I never betrayed my oaths. 

So, spren don`t swear oaths("speak the words") and can`t betray them either. They are not Knights Radiant themselves right?

When I read this in the book, I thought Aux used to be human and somhow through some machinations formed a Nahel bond with Nomad. Thoughts?  

[Treamayne]

16 hours ago, Diomedes said:

So, spren don`t swear oaths("speak the words") and can`t betray them either. They are not Knights Radiant themselves right?

When I read this in the book, I thought Aux used to be human and somhow through some machinations formed a Nahel bond with Nomad. Thoughts?  

It is implied that Highspren (some/most/all?) consider themselves to be the Radiant and their Mortal to be a squire (which may explain how they withhold Division from Skybreakers until the Third Oath). That said, except for very few lines from Szeth's Spren (we still don't know their name), Aux is really the first bonded Highspren we have seen on-screen, so this could just be his specific point of view. With a distant third option based on the Adolin Reverse Bond theory:

Spoiler

Some posit that based on the Adolin / Maya scene in RoW that Adolin is forging a Bond with Maya, but it will be Maya that needs to "oath" (or similar) in order for Adolin's bond to help restore her from being a Dead-eye. If this is the case for Nomad and Aux, then (theoretically) Aux was a deadeye that Nomad was able to return to cognition through a bond - which might explain the line where Nomad says they met in what is probably Shadesmar. 

Either way, we don't really know how this is working or why. . . yet.

Edited April 15 by Treamayne
SPAG

[+robardin he/him]

17 hours ago, Diomedes said:

So, spren don`t swear oaths("speak the words") and can`t betray them either. They are not Knights Radiant themselves right?

When I read this in the book, I thought Aux used to be human and somhow through some machinations formed a Nahel bond with Nomad. Thoughts?  

I don't think spren are capable of breaking oaths the way that humans are, it's part of what makes them spren!

And yet, bonding to a human to gain experience, to become more flexible, and more... entangled with the Physical World is part of the reason they enter the Nahel bond (at least for some spren).

As @Treamayne said we don't "really know" yet what Aux meant by that, but can fan-theorize.

My personal take is, whether it's a "highspren thing" or an Aux thing, or an "Aux after being maimed in whatever incident happened to him" thing, is that Aux views the oaths Sigzil swore in bonding with him as an equal partnership.

They (Aux and Sigzil) were in it together, every step of the way. And if "Nomad" has fallen away from some of his former ideals, the "truth he once knew", well Aux can't, and hasn't. Thus, Aux is (still) a Knight Radiant from his POV, while Nomad is the wayward squire. (Maybe something has happened in/since SA5 to eliminate the "deadeye" phenomenon of the Recreance, which Kalak noted had never happened before binding of B-A-M when Surgebinders forswore their oaths.)

As evidence, Aux says "I swore to be better than I was". That is not part of the First Ideal, nor any of the Skybreaker Ideals that we know of (and we know all five), nor any Windrunner Ideal through the Fourth.

If anything, it most closely resembles Dalinar's Third Ideal of the Bondsmiths, "If I must fall, I will rise each time a better man."

I think that speaks to the spren's POV that the very act of entering a Nahel bond is a kind of un-sprenlike commitment to grow and to change, to progress, which can be viewed as the spren being just as much a Knight Radiant as the human half of the bond.