TheFoxQR

Hopequencher if it's one of those flat, spiky ones, Passionfire if it has that flamelike design or Cremsong if its one of those slender ones.

Relevant WoB:

I didn't think of that quote at the time of writing - but I still do think that the Voidbinding that is depicted in the Chart isn't yet a big thing. The 10 Surge, 10 order thing is not something I see as Odium giving his enemy, not to mention that Sja-ant enlightening Radiantspren is a recent development. If there was Voidbinding before, it could be of other forms, like maybe workings of Fabriels or parts of Singer culture on the side of Humanity which could bond Voidspren (and would do so in controlled environments?) because the rules of magic allow it, and Odium couldn't stop it from happening. I don't know about the Unmade - but they are definitely Splinters of Odium. I don't quite understand what they could have been before - if they were all Godspren, then it makes 12 in total and that's just... random. Maybe they were fewer entities before, and Odium split those into 9 supercharged pieces? Even if you discount them, the core idea is some of Odium's investiture is now in play on Roshar - be it as corruptions of existing spren, the Fused or the Everstorm.

The Intent rule applies to pretty much every magic system. From what I can tell, these components exist in every magic system: A power source A way to access the system - a switch of sorts A way to shape or focus the power Intent allows you to turn the switch on and off at will. Depending on the system, Intent can also influence Point no. 3. Take Allomancy for example. The Power Source: Preservation's power, directly coming from the spiritual. The Access Switch: The right spiritual "genes" which allow you to burn metal The Focus: The resonance of the metal's molecular structure (this is also what Seeking makes you hear) Let's take a look at Elantrian AonDor: The Power Source: The Dor The Access Switch: The Shaod The Focus: The Aon equation or program drawn Intent allows you to start drawing Aons in the air at will - it's not just the finger movements, but there also needs to be an intention to draw an Aon that makes an Aon actually appear. Knight Radiant Surgebinding is a little weird, right? It's almost as if there is another Cognitive entity coming into play there. If we were to break it down into that format, then this is the best I can do: The Power Source: Stormlight The Access Switch: The Nahel bond, and the Spren you are bonded to The Focus: Intent allows you to shape the effect of your Surge, and the Surge manipulates the actual forces for you Except Point no. 2 is a fully living cognitive entity capable of thought and intent, too. In fact, the spren are practically cognitive personifications of their own Surges. And the bond connects the two beings together - it's almost as if the Knight Radiant can subconsciously access the instinctive capabilities of their Spren via the Nahel Bond. Either way, I wouldn't look at Surgebinding's oddities as something general - Adonalsium's influence is directly at play there + the complete dependence on another sapient being (and one that has no parallel in real life) makes significantly more complicated. Relevant WoB:

There is an interesting tidbit from the Arcanum Unbounded that might interest you: Relevant bits in bold. And considering that Sel's Cognitive is where most of the core of Devotion's investiture is, with no Vessel to channel it, I wonder if seeds of a second Adonalsium are beginning to take root there. Maybe this plays into the greater Cosmere plot? I dunno. I've always found this interesting; the idea of something greater with origins lost in time is extremely intriguing. And scary.

It seems increasingly that Honor's number isn't 10, but rather 9 + 1. Practically everything associated with him follows that trend. There are 10 Surges, but 1 (Adhesion) seems uniquely his. There are 10 kinds of Radiantspren, but 9 are similar-ish, and the Bondsmith spren are different. There were 10 Heralds, but 1 wasn't supposed to be there. 10 Heralds went to war on Braize, but 9 broke and abandoned the Oathpact, and 1 survived. In the Recreance, 9 orders abandoned their Oaths, but 1 went into hiding. I don't know if this has to do with the influence of Odium or not, but I think that might be the case.

It even fits thematically, as the only known Voidbinding ability so far is the ability to see the Future. This is one of those things I've been thinking about since the moment I put Voidbinding in the middle. The idea is, Knights Radiant needed Odium's influence to get Voidbinding. So the Regals should need more Honor, and the Fused should need more Cultivation. Except, why do the Fused actually need Singer bodies? From what we know of Cognitive Shadows, they need something to staple themselve to the Physical, like maybe a spike. So I was wondering, maybe the Fused are actually piggy-backing on the same magic as the Singer Forms. As in, instead of a Singer going out and bonding some spren and this affecting their Form, in the case of a Fused, the role of the spren is played by the Cognitive Shadow of an ancient Singer, but significantly more forcefully and overwriting some of the Cognitive aspects of the singer whose body is being taken over. Sort of a forceful and violent hack of that system. In this case then, the diagram would be a bit more complex and look something like this:

Thanks! I spent some time on it over the weekend, going over and revising every concept I wanted explored. I've also been thinking on the names for the Voidbinding Knights, and personally I like Knights Voidant. Then I looked at the synonyms for Void (Abyss, Oblivion, etc.), and also really dig Knights Abyssal or Knights Lacuna. But my personal favourite has to be the Knights Oblivious.

Well, the Unmade exist, so he is invested somewhat, but I agree with you on that count. Also, I'm reasonably convinced that there was no ancient Voidbinding. Renarin is a first. And by the end of the tenth book, Voidbinding will be the system that might replace a dying KR-Surgebinding, or at best will exist alongside.

The Voidbinding Chart is not indicative of the Fused system, that has been established in this very thread, I think. The Fused system and the Surgebinding chart are both riffing on the system used by the Heralds. The Voidbinding chart is something separate entirely. If you want to discuss the systems, then maybe here would be a better idea:

He bonds a Cryptic at the end of OB, so I don't think this one's gonna happen. I don't think so. I'm pretty sure all bonds target the same part of the soul/spiritweb, and there's not enough space to do more than one. You could theoretically push to two maybe, but anything more than that has to be extremely hard, as the Investiture will just interfere then. IMO, Hoid just got access to lightweaving, I doubt he's gonna pick anything more, so I doubt he's gonna go into Voidbinding or Cultivation's system, which I still doubt is anything but organic versions of what we see as Fabriels.

There's also something almost tongue-in-cheek that (thematically) supports this that I only just realised. It has been said that Odium is bound by the powers of Honor and Cultivation. Let me repeat that. Odium. The Void. Is bound. By the powers of Honor and Cultivation. Yep, I mostly agree on all counts. Not all bonds could be Honor. Or even if the Bonding is using Honor's investiture, it's not actively of Honor. It's only using it as a realmatic tool to accomplish something - the bond - and is not actively driven by it. All investiture in the Cosmere is attached to some Shard, so even if something is pre-Shattering, it is now of some shard. Relevant WoB: I think the idea is that investiture has some fundamental properties that are unique to each Shard. Say Honor's investiture, for example, is naturally good at being a form of cosmic glue and binding things together. Ditto for Cultivation's investiture having certain mannerisms/quirks. So when Adonalsium was originally creating Roshar, he used investiture to accomplish certain things, and due to some intrinsic property of that investiture (some specific type of investiture was used to bind things together, some investiture was used with the intention of encouraging growth), it got assigned to Honor and Cultivation post-shattering. That's why those two came to Roshar eventually - a bigly part of their known investiture was already at play there. The idea being things like the Highstorms were using Honor-affiliated investiture even pre-shattering, but it only actually became Honor's investiture post shattering because Honor didn't exist before then. Adonalsium was already boosting evolution on Roshar to bring it up to snuff, and that investiture then became Cultivation's, who then took the reigns and made the system truly hers. This is the same principle that allowed Nightblood to be invested with Ruin's investiture - when it was given the command to destroy things, the Breadth sought out the kind of investiture that realmatically specialises in destroying things. It wasn't created by Ruin, it's just using Ruin-type investiture as a tool to accomplish it's own goals.

I literally mention in the post I linked that I don't think Listener Forms and spren bonds have anything to do with Honor, and propose the idea that they are of Cultivation instead. I literally, explicitly, said that. I even put it in a Venn Diagram. Where we do disagree is the Fused, and I'm proposing the idea that the Fused and Knights Radiant are both one step removed from the Heralds. The Fused because they're Herald-like in every sense but one - their Surgebinding uses different surge-pairs and is powered by Odium. The Knights Radiant because they use the same surge-pairs and also power them by stormlight, but do so by bonding spren instead, and this doesn't make them cognitive shadows.

That's sort of the point of a discussion, you're supposed to pick it apart. So don't worry about it.

I'm personally leaning towards some sort of Cognitive Shadow, "hiding" and fighting Cultivation's silent war. Maybe even a Spiritual Shadow of some sort.

The idea doesn't sound bad, but wrong in the sense that Bondsmiths are said to be close to Honor, whereas boosting evolution or encouraging nature sounds Cultivation-y. Maybe that's how the Nightwatcher Bondsmith behaves?

We fundamentally interpret those in different ways, and I'm not sure I can convince you of my viewpoint, nor can you convince me of yours. To me this is actually re-enforcing my viewpoint rather than yours: You're literally ignoring all of that and just focusing on "of Scadrial" to mean the planet and not the person. You didn't even post most of the relevant bits. To me that phrase seems to imply Realmatic interactions like the Well of Ascension, the Pits of Hathsin, the mists, etc. Yes, a Shardworld technically is an extension of the Shard. For e.g., our eyes can only see a small slice of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. This is because that specific slice is the one that best propagates through the environment they evolved in - namely water and atmosphere. So, technically, our eyes are a function of the Earth. But that's because they developed to work in the conditions present there, in reaction to those conditions. On Scadrial, metals were investiture from Preservation and Ruin. So it just made more sense to use them for fuel. On Roshar, there are no plate tectonics, and so solid investiture structures which can channel and focus investiture along certain pathways have been generated by organic chemistry. This being a function of the planet is because of the nature of conditions on those planets, not something that automatically makes it so because the planet just exists. To me, the idea that human spiritwebs on Scadrial were made keeping future Allomancy-Feruchemy in mind makes more sense than something inherent to the actual physical planet that facilitates it. While I agree with the words you put down about Honor-Roshar to an extent, I don't with the idea behind them.

My personal take on it: I've only been wondering because of the "natural paths" WoB. As there are multiple different origins for humans (atleast two, possibly more), the idea that Sho-Del on Yolen were sustained by the investiture in one of the two eco-systems there, and that same species when integrated with Rosharran ecology gives us the Singers.

How closely related are the Singers and Sho-Del?

au contraire, I discuss this here. It seems the Fused are using Honor's system - the idea of binding surges by infusions in the spiritweb. Except, theirs was granted to them by Odium, and comes with all the benefits and pitfalls of his mentality.

What. With all due respect, I disagree. What gives you the idea that the powers have anything to do with the planet? ... why would it even work like that? How? Its not like investing in a planet makes cosmic blocks fall into place which will define all magic happening on the planet. Just... no. Investing in a planet isn't some special thing. It's just letting your investiture permeate the planet. When Brandon is mentioning natural pathways, he's just talking about how the laws of realmatic theory allow certain things to happen more easily than others. Hydrogen is extremely common in the universe, and so using it as fuel would be more natural for a star than... say uranium. It's just physics. We can't even begin to think what a star would look like if it wasn't using hydrogen as fuel at some point in it's lifetime. Just like physical human bodies are extremely complex structures, so would spiritual human spiritwebs. Just like physical human bodies have many different pathways for energy and food and a million different things to regulate inside them, so would there be spiritual analogues. There would be sub structures in those spiritwebs that allow people to manifest powers. This has nothing to with what planet a Shard is invested in, except maybe on a planet like Roshar where magic and ecosystem are heavily linked, by the nature of the ecosystem and the role investiture plays in it. Tell me, in your version what would happen if an allomancer went off world, and than Harmony pulled away from Scadrial and it just disappeared in a poof of cosmic realmatic smoke? Would Allomancy just stop existing? Would that Allomancer be suddenly powerless? What an allomancer can do by burning steel is a property of an allomancer, and not Scadrial or steel. It's his spiritweb that translates the structure of steel, exchanges it with some amount of preservation's investiture, and uses it to establish a connection with a metal object and than converts it into the energy needed to generate mutual repelling force. This has nothing to do with Scadrial or Preservation or Harmony. He can't stop this from happening, unless he surgically modifies said allomancer's spiritweb to remove this capability. Vin was special in the sense that she could short-circuit this entire stream and directly use raw power from preservation to power her allomancy. This is why Ruin sought her out. And even if I accept your argument it doesn't answer my original question. Honor invested in the planet long before Humans came to it. So did Cultivation. If the surge-pairs exist naturally because of the nature of the planet, and Honor's investment in it, why do they still show up only after he gives Honorblades to Heralds, and not before? This is literally what Brandon is getting into via Fabriels. The idea that when people do magic, the power is manifest through their spiritweb. However, this process can be artificially duplicated via physical constructs, and their potentially spiritual shadows. This is why Fabriels can also channel Surges, albeit in a limited way. A Fabriel channeling Gravitation will do so in extremely specific ways, whereas a Surgebinder binding Gravitation is a lot more flexible in channeling said Surge. But Fabriels can do a lot more than just channel Surges. This is similar to how both an eye and a mechanical camera both use the same properties of light and lenses, but an eye is significantly better at seeing under normal circumstances, because it's just better integrated with our brains. We could see was through eyes for the longest period of time. But technology got us through several generation of cameras, and now our understanding of the basic physics involved is sufficiently advanced for us to to build light based devices which extend our capabilities (nightvision, infra-red based heat maps, etc.) and do things beyond what our biological bodies can do. Fabriels in SA are like the first mechanical cameras. So is ettmetal tech on Scadrial. This will eventually happen everywhere in the Cosmere. This is the shift that will happen when it moves from Fantasy to Sci Fi. Relevant WoBs:

That is the question. He even mentions later that he initially thought he could just leave, but the budding Knights Radiant and Stormfather seem to be becoming big enough threats that he will have to take them out.

He did, but found it later.

Yes... but shoving D&D in the cognitive seems like a separate thing. It's like... once he splinters a Shard, he also needs to make sure that someone else doesn't pick it up. That's what the Selish situation feels like. Maybe, since that was technically his first time using said method personally, it seems he didn't pull it off quite right. Maybe the pieces afterwords weren't small enough, so he just mixed the investiture and dumped them in the Cognitive to prevent them from gaining sentience or picking a new vessel. By the time he went after Ambition, he seems to be much better at it. So he just set up his draining-inversion mechanism and left, knowing it will kill Ambition eventually and the pieces will be small enough to not be a challenge/problem later. In other words, he seems a lot more confident and better at it by then. I really don't think Sel is an ideal example, simply because he seems to still be... almost practising there. On Roshar, look for red spren, or redness around the Fused or the Regals, as those seem more co-opted. The Knights Radiant are still un-corrupted - they seem to still be using Honor-Cultivation affiliated investiture without any co-opting. Except Renaris, where Glys does produce red visuals iirc, because Glys does seem to be on an Honor-Cultivation-Odium spectrum - a corrupted spren. Similarly, Sadeas-Amaram's men have red eyes at the Battle of Thaylen, when they are forcefully turned by Odium.

Do we have any theories on what Odium's way of splintering a Shard is? My suspicion is that one of the reasons he doesn't like investing in planets is because that is his avenue of attack. Presumably, once a Shard begins investing in a place, they give up some control over this invested power, and make it available for whatever/whoever they invest in to utilise. Odium, then, corrupts or co-opts a Shard's invested sources and turns them against their own Shard. In effect, he turns a Shard's outgoing invested power inwards towards itself to weaken and shatter it into splinters. This works similar to how condensed Atium, when taken away from Ruin, weakened him. Except in Odium's case, his corruption of the Shards invested sources makes those sources actively fight their own Shard. So not only does the Shard weaken by loosing access to it's own power, but that power is actively working against it's own intent, drawing more and more power from the Shard, inevitably leading to eventual splintering. Now Odium seems to have been forced to invest in Roshar. And Cultivation has seen him shatter Honor. Odium literally is about to potentially invest in Taravangian and Moash. What's your take on this?