Odium's Power and Passion

[TheBlueShifting he/him]

Recently I received a comment on my Oathbringer Lore video that started me down this particular rabbit hole. “I don’t get why Odium doesn’t take the power of the shards he kills.” (VREODe) Initially, this seemed easy to answer. Odium already has a purpose and intent that goes so well in line with the Vessel’s own intent and incorporating other shards would only muddle that intent further. But as I thought about the implications I realized that there is something that I was overlooking about the nature of Odium and the potential union that we might have overlooked. The power and intent of Ambition.

[Credit to Botanica Xu who created Grandpa Odium, please follow the link and follow her on Tumbler]

First let’s review why Odium would willingly pass up the power of a shattered shard. Harmony is the perfect example of the danger combining shards poses. While Harmony likely wields the greatest collective power in the Cosmere at the moment, he is also the most severely limited. In his letter to Hoid he expresses the growing struggles he has in acting upon the greater Cosmere due to the need to maintain the balance between two opposing shards. This seems to restrict him far more than the single shards ever were. His immense power might destroy him if he is not careful.

It's easy to see that such a conflicting nature would be incredibly unappealing to a shard like Odium. He obviously has plans and intent to destroy or at least subdue the other powers of the Cosmere for his own ends. Perhaps he is just paranoid that he will fall like Adonalsium and seeks to eliminate any potential threats who have the investiture or knowledge to destroy him. In fact, the nature of events on Scadrial, where mortals ascend and destroy an established shard, likely haunt his dreams. This would explain Odium’s apparent terror when Dalinar created a perpendicularity. At that moment Dalinar became a sliver of something Odium thought destroyed and he fled. It seems clear to me that Odium fears to lose his power, and that fear motivates his actions.

But what does this have to do with the death of Ambition?

Brandon has said that the moment the shards scattered across the stars, Odium was targeting Ambition. Likely he foresaw Ambition as the most likely to challenge his rule and thus needed to be eliminated. Ambition wasn’t the first shard to fall, but eventually, Odium took her out. There are scraps of power left behind from that encounter, so we know the fight was figuratively bloody. After the downfall and splintering of Dominion and Devotion Odium left quite a mess of their investiture and the effects of his decision to lock the investiture in the Cognitive Realm has resulted in some unintended consequences. Perhaps he has refined his ability to kill shards since then, and he had another opportunity with Ambition. It is likely then to assume that the shattering of Ambition was far cleaner, and perhaps it will be difficult to determine what exactly happened until the events of that fight are canonized.

But as I answered this question some small thoughts that had been floating around in my mind came back to me. Core questions that I couldn’t shake off. How was Odium able to fight and kill two shards that were united? Would the power of Ambition resonate with a man like Rayse who already had so much natural ambition? Has it ever been stated officially that Odium is just one shard?

Devotion and Dominion were likely pitted against each other allowing Odium to bring them down due to their opposing natures. But Honor and Cultivation are not so opposed. The nature of their relationship was likely complicated but it didn’t seem as openly hostel as other pairings thus far. It seems odd that another equal albeit aggressive shard could sweep in and kill Honor. In fact, it seems to me that Honor and Cultivation sought to trap Odium to prevent his future rampaging. So, what happened? How did one defeat two? I think Odium secretly holds more than his share of power. What reason does he have to abandon the power of a defeated shard that matches his own intent so well?

In physics, there are some curious effects that we can observe in the nature of sound waves. If you have two sound waves that have the same amplitude but inverted phase (antiphase), they will cancel each other out leaving a strange silence behind. This is observably similar to the nature of Ruin and Preservation, two similar yet opposing forces that cancel each other out. However, if you have two wavelengths of equal strength that are in phase they amplify into one more powerful wave. This is likely a parallel that can be drawn between two different shards. If opposed they cancel each other out. If in phase they can amplify.

Based on the observed Cosmere, I doubt that Odium completely took all of Ambition’s power, it seems there were large splinters left behind at least on one world. But I sincerely doubt Odium would leave behind the power that would only bolster his intent and nature. It would explain why he has become such a danger to the Cosmere that Hoid seeks to gather the other shards against him. Remember Odium destroyed Honor and seeks to destroy Cultivation so he can break free of the Rosharian system. The other shards might only be safe currently because Odium has been trapped on Roshar for so long.  

Naturally, there is little support for this theory, and I’m likely wrong about this. Perhaps Odium would be too paranoid of corrupting his own power base to incorporate even a portion of another shard. Yet there are some observations that I can make that imply that I might be right about this. For instance, it is interesting that on Threnody the fragment of ambition seems to create cognitive shadows of the deceased that can act of their own accord, something that seems prevalent in the forces of Odium and the fused. Is it hard to believe that the power to infuse the remains of the dead into service is a power that Odium acquired rather than developed? To me, it seems far too likely to be a coincidence and the temptation of Ambition’s power far too great to be ignored.

[Weltall]

Rayse is not concerned so much by the possibility of conflicting Intents as he is that taking up any other Shard would alter his personality and he's adamantly opposed to that.

Quote

Odium just wants to be top dog. And your two ways to be top dog are to climb higher, or to lower everyone else. And he's like, we're gonna lower everyone else. Because I know, if I combine, it stops being me, is what his opinion is. I would no longer be the person I am. I would change into someone else. And then that person gets to rule, and I don't want that person to rule. I want to. source

Brandon has been pretty clear that Rayse will not absorb power from another Shard because he doesn't want his personality altered by the Intent in any way, and it doesn't take an entire Shard to do that. For example, it doesn't take many Breaths before you start to be influenced by Endowment's Intent. Taking up any chunk of a dead Shard's power would be enough for Rayse to be influenced and he's not having any of that. Brandon has said that Odium's edge when fighting the other Shards can at times involve him being more powerful, but that's because he actively avoids Investing any of it in a world while the Shards he's fought have locked up at least some of their power in that way, leaving Odium with more power at his disposal. Not because he's secretly absorbed part of Ambition.

Oh, and it's been confirmed that yes, Ambition was on the top of the hit list because Rayse felt that Shard was the biggest potential threat. Given what Edgli had to say about Uli Da, Rayse was probably justified in putting her first.