Spren-Spren Bond?

[Steel Speedster ♂]

So Notum picked up a set of Unoathed Shards. Does that mean that he’s somehow bonded to a (former) deadeye spren, in the same way that Adolin is bonded to Maya?

That raises a lot of questions for me. If this is possible, then could a spren become a Knight Radiant by bonding another spren? Or, even weirder, could two spren bond each other and both become Radiants? Maybe the weirdest of all, could you nest Nahel bonds and have a human bonded to a spren, bonded to another spren?

[Darth_Hel]

I’m not sure exactly how “bonded” Adolin and Maya actually are. The Oaths were used to bond Radiants and their Spren, but Adolin prefers promises. So, it may be less a formal bond and more just friends helping eachother type situation. Less formal and permanent.

[Treamayne]

3 hours ago, Steel Speedster said:

So Notum picked up a set of Unoathed Shards. Does that mean that he’s somehow bonded to a (former) deadeye spren, in the same way that Adolin is bonded to Maya?

That raises a lot of questions for me. If this is possible, then could a spren become a Knight Radiant by bonding another spren? Or, even weirder, could two spren bond each other and both become Radiants? Maybe the weirdest of all, could you nest Nahel bonds and have a human bonded to a spren, bonded to another spren?

At the risk of sounding haughty, since we have more than one thread on this topic, I'll quote what I said there, with Links and WoBs:

On 1/16/2025 at 3:14 PM, Treamayne said:

On 1/16/2025 at 3:02 PM, Stormtide_Leviathan said:

Is there any reason a spren can't form the normally-human/singer half of the bond? We've seen a herald bond a spren, and as a cognitive shadow there's a lot of similarity between Nale and a Spren. The sticking point there might be that they have more Connection to the physical realm than a spren does, and that's critical for the bond. So in most cases, probably not, no a spren can't bond with another spren.

But what about cases like Notum? He has more presence in the physical realm than most spren, and was able to bond a shardblade and plate. So is there any reason he couldn't form a full radiant bond? (Presumably, if a spren were to do this, they would bond with another of their same kind. It's hard to imagine an honorspren being a better fit for any order other than windrunners)

It's theorized that this is what is happening between Adolin and Maya. It is unlikely that it would make Maya Radiant (or accessing Surges, at least) but it does seem to be a form of nahel Bond very similar to what you describe. Explained in more detail here. 

WoB:

  Hide contents

Kolby Bradshaw

Could a spren bond another spren?

Brandon Sanderson

Theoretically possible, probably not a direction I'm ever going to go in the books for inception/recursive sort of weirdness reasons, but theoretically possible.

YouTube Spoiler Stream 2 (June 3, 2021)

 

Hope that Helps

[+robardin he/him]

Notum being fully physical in Azimir in support of Adolin was already weird, even before Retribution Changed Everything.

I mean, he was "fully physical" not in the Crazy Ishar Experiment way, he could change size and all that like Syl could do; but he walked around all the time fully visible by everyone, fully himself, and able to take up Shards versus being barely able to lift a pen in the Physical Realm like Syl was at Urithiru, even though Syl was bonded unto the Fourth Ideal.

Most unbonded Radiant spren had a tough time manifesting enough to communicate with people briefly, and generally only someone already bonded, AFAICT. And his being "fully himself" mentally was in notable contrast to one of the things Kaladin held over Yunfah's head, the unbonded honorspren who'd lost his Radiant, to "consider" bonding Rlain: "you need a bond, or your mind will fade".

So it could well be just something about Notum and his decision to cross over to the Physical Realm, but NOT "in search of a Nahel bond". He may be the first sentient spren ever to choose to do that?

[Ripheus23]

Offhand, the process would be a metaphor for the possibility of "gluonium" IRL. Gluons are strong-force/binding particles, as far as we know thoroughly indivisible, but in principle they can form composites from just each other, no fermions needed at that stage. However, these composite states are not, AFAIK, predicted to be stable/consistent over anything approaching technologically-practical timescales. Like, sure, in some insane distant future where you could set up huge arrays that would generate small masses of gluonium to combine further, in the narrow window, maybe that could have a cool effect. Stuff like that, but aside from all that, gluonium is not expected to be "useful."

So, based on @Treamayne's information, that's why I'd say having a spren-to-spren bond might not be all-too-"useful," either. OTOH, Shardplate by nature is multiple spren bonding "through" each other, not just to the holder of the Plate but to each other as the united armor. So, not useless, exactly, but in a sense we've been given the full illustrative scene for this magic type, i.e. Adolin's endgame in W&T. So, when combined with extreme luck/Fortune(?), spren-to-spren armor/related bonding can be very useful, but this doesn't translate into a full "subsystem'" of the magic where the good luck of the given case would be extrapolated to other, and more frequent/common, cases. There's just this "one-off" situation where magical "gluonium," so to speak, made the difference.

Corollary: in LDS metaphysics, it is in fact a sort of spiritual binding power that is regarded as highly characteristic of even the very power of creation. Official LDS theory: the phrase "creation ex nihilo" isn't entirely valid; Sanderson has finagled about this by trying to balance descriptions of LDS creation-from-pre-existent-matter with the mainstream/classical creation-from-nothingness account. At any rate, there are also philosophical issues like "the unity of propositions" that play into these themes. The propositional unity problem is how abstract propositions can be objectively structured so as to be physically reflected by information in the empirical/real world. How do the parts objectively attach? For {L, <, R} as a mere list doesn't tell us how to arrange its terms. But then from the LDS point of view, propositional unity is one of the levels of the binding power through which creation, as true creation of truth, occurs. In the cosmere, this has to do with Connection via Spiritual functions, it seems. For example, one of the most harrowing effects of Hemalurgy, we are told, is how it can rearrange the furniture of Connection so violently and imposingly. I assume that some of this goes back to Sanderson's religious background, so that he is explicitly, knowingly using the image of divine crucifixion in a way that seems subversive/blasphemous if not given the textual respect that it deserves. Then the almost-omnipresent malignancy of Hemalurgy is precisely because it is a horror-story inversion of the classical picture of divine crucifixion (as the point of salvation). (When micro-spiking is used technologically, maybe this problem'll go away, though...)

What is Hemalurgy dependent so strictly on? Maybe there's an overemphasis in Sanderson's texts themselves, or the Coppermind, or whatever, but there's some strong indication that the binding-point techniques are uniquely crucial, here. So, again, there is a representation of divine power in terms of unification on a transcendental level, but Connecting a pure Connection to itself, or to other pure Connections, seems like it would be not very far from having pure graphs that enter into small loops. These are mathematically possible objects but, aside from category-theoretic tangents regarding these, they don't seem to play a very informative role in the development of graph theory at large, as far as I know.

[ChillPenguin]

On 2/5/2025 at 10:47 AM, robardin said:

Notum being fully physical in Azimir in support of Adolin was already weird, even before Retribution Changed Everything.

I mean, he was "fully physical" not in the Crazy Ishar Experiment way, he could change size and all that like Syl could do; but he walked around all the time fully visible by everyone, fully himself, and able to take up Shards versus being barely able to lift a pen in the Physical Realm like Syl was at Urithiru, even though Syl was bonded unto the Fourth Ideal.

Most unbonded Radiant spren had a tough time manifesting enough to communicate with people briefly, and generally only someone already bonded, AFAICT. And his being "fully himself" mentally was in notable contrast to one of the things Kaladin held over Yunfah's head, the unbonded honorspren who'd lost his Radiant, to "consider" bonding Rlain: "you need a bond, or your mind will fade".

So it could well be just something about Notum and his decision to cross over to the Physical Realm, but NOT "in search of a Nahel bond". He may be the first sentient spren ever to choose to do that?

I would guess that spren tried but they couldn’t manage it before. I don’t see why a spren seeking a bond would cause them to fade. Unless this is one of those Intent things. Seems unlikely to me.

Also, Notum can’t actually hold anything. He’s controlling the plate from the inside, which is holding the shardblade,  but he couldn’t hold the blade on his own.