Spren Mass

[Trusk'our he/him]

An interaction in my Hijo thread caused a thought pass through my mind again yesterday that hasn't prodded me in a while. When an Invested entity is summoned into physical, metallic form (be it a Shardblade or a Hijo construct), their size can vary dramatically in the Physical Realm. A Radiant could summon their Blade as a tiny scalpel in one moment, then change it to a hulking seven-foot slab of overly ornate death the next.

So, where does this extra Investiture go when not turned into metal?

I suppose the easiest and most intuitive hypothesis is that the Spren (or Hijo, or other similar being) simply branches over into the CR since Spren already do that to an extent normally, but I'm curious- does anyone have other ideas as to what happens to that extra Investiture, or perhaps a canon answer I missed somewhere?

 

As a side thought, if you were to turn your Spren into a spike (let's just assume for the sake of the argument that it can splice something into you as long as it's there and that it's not too attached to being a Blade conceptually to prevent it from working as a Hemalurgic spike in this situation), would the physical size matter as it would with regular Hemalurgy for determining its Investiture? My guess after thinking about it is actually no, since that Investiture should still be present and attached to the metal in some way, just not in physical form. It would matter for mundane metals, since the size determines how much Investiture can be captured within them, but I think the Spren metals are a different matter.

And, with that thought, it now makes me think that you could potentially overcome the physical restrictions on Hemalurgic spike storage and Metalmind storage as long as you could mimic the principles that Spren metals use (assuming, of course, that this is in fact the way that things work. It's all just a maybe right now).

[PanLin they/he]

Matter = energy = Investiture

I aways assumed that a spren manifesting a larger object simply required more Investiture/energy to both create and maintain, especially when reading about Nomad summing Aux as various things, which seems to be supported on Aux's wiki:

Spoiler

All manifestations require some amount of Investiture which is continuously drawn as long as the manifestation is present.^[35][40] Larger or heavier manifested objects require a greater amount while most manifestations below about one hundred pounds require a negligible amount of Investiture and are not worth accounting for.^[35][55][9] 

Conversely, with a smaller item, part of them should just sort of remain in the cognitive realm, like how emotion spren are only partially visible in the physical realm while their 'true', whole form is only visible in the cognitive.