Sel, investiture, and Shards

[Jorville he/him]

So, I am going to start off a little odd but hopefully I will bring it back around and make some sense.

The Aristotelian notion of the Animus was his way of explaining things like gravity. Where a ball falls back to the ground after being thrown up because it desires to. This implies that even objects have at least some sort will. Now we all understand that this was more or less an error but I was thinking about this sort of concept and Sel.

Now Shards are a bunch of investiture with an intent. To me that seems similar to the notion of Animus for Aristotle. With a Shard having Intent, if something were to happen, as Devotion and Dominion being shattered, pieces of their investiture having scattered would have some Animus of Intent. I understand that the bulk of their investiture is in the cognitive realm, but it is still scattered and spread around on Sel. Arcanum Unbounded goes so far as to say the land may even be so invested that it has some awareness.

This brings me to Sazed pulling the power of the Shards into himself. It seems to me that in the scene where he does so that his will, or intent, allows him to take the power of the Shards and use them. Now I imagine that Sazed being able to do that would mean that it was similar for the others who took up the Shards.

Now comes my questions. If it was able to be done with a full Shard, could the same then be done with the splinter, that is to say, if you had enough intent and investiture yourself, could you take that splinter into yourself? Following that, would you be able to draw more of the Intent/investiture of the Shard to yourself if you did so? Following that could you absorb enough of the shard where its Intent or Animus seeks you out and a critical mass is achieved where you would then draw the rest of the shard into yourself and then would be Devotion or Dominion?

I hope that that is clear and would love to know if I am just reading too much into things or way off base on ideas about the nature of investiture and Intent and Shards in general.

[Weltall]

Welcome to the Shard!

You can bond with Splinters, that much is well established. On Sel you have people bonding Splinters of Devotion (it's what the seon are) and rather more obviously on Roshar you have Nahel Bonds between humans and spren which are Splinters of Honor and/or Cultivation. However, it's not a question of willpower but whether or not the local magic system allows for it and whether the Splinter itself is open to such a bond. It's a formalized process on Roshar for example; you don't bond a spren until and unless that spren chooses you. Brandon has pointed this out as being a magic system you can't cheat your way into via things like hemalurgy and Forgery. Nalthis has another form of human/Splinter bond, since the Returned are essentially humans whose souls are stapled back into their bodies with a Splinter of Endowment aka the Divine Breath. You have to accept Endowment's offer to Return, but she's the one deciding to make the offer in the first place.

Ascension is the process of taking up so much Investiture that your body sublimates. The most obvious example of this is the Shards (which is why Sazed's body vanishes when he takes up Preservation and Ruin, and why Ati and Leras' bodies reappear when they die) but we also see it happen with Preservation's Perpendicularity, which is designed to temporarily grant someone a large chunk of that Shard's power. However, even with that power it's still only a fraction of what the Shard has at its disposal and so you can't take the Shard that way.

Anyhow, the thing with taking up a Shard is less to do with personal willpower and more whether or not you have Connection to the Shard in question. Secret History gives us some ideas how this works. That's sort of the required first step. At this point the only time we've seen someone take a Shard, it's been intact so there was a single representation of all that power that the future Vessel(s) could grab. With a splintered Shard like Honor or the Selish duo, we don't really have a frame of reference for how you'd go about Ascending, especially in the latter case as the power is currently hanging out in the Cognitive Realm and making things especially weird. There might be a 'critical mass' factor or it might work out some other way, we don't really know.

In what may be relevant, Brandon was asked once what the result would be if someone were able to absorb the entire Do. He said they would be equal in power to Harmony but he clearly paused after he started talking about taking up that power and then decided not to say any more.

[Jorville he/him]

17 minutes ago, Weltall said:

Anyhow, the thing with taking up a Shard is less to do with personal willpower and more whether or not you have Connection to the Shard in question. Secret History gives us some ideas how this works. That's sort of the required first step. At this point the only time we've seen someone take a Shard, it's been intact so there was a single representation of all that power that the future Vessel(s) could grab. With a splintered Shard like Honor or the Selish duo, we don't really have a frame of reference for how you'd go about Ascending, especially in the latter case as the power is currently hanging out in the Cognitive Realm and making things especially weird. There might be a 'critical mass' factor or it might work out some other way, we don't really know.

I wasn't trying to imply willpower but more the idea that a person's own intention. If your intention becomes perfectly in line with that of a Shard would that not draw the power to you? I am not sure on this but it would follow that each person has some amount of their own Investiture by virtue of their existence and if the entirety of that investiture is then committed to something via their intention. It seems logical to me that if you were to take in the investiture invested you would then have more intent that comes with the investiture of a Shard, or am I putting too much importance on the intent of a shard?