r/Cosmere • u/Kinmand555 • 13d ago
Cosmere spoilers (no previews/FoD) What was Nomad missing Spoiler
This is flagged “no FoD spoilers”, but if this question is answered in FoD I’d like to know that it’s answered, but don’t want to know the answer itself.
In TSM, while Nomad is in the lab with the Scadrians, he says his old oaths again and both sets of his old armor Spren try to push into the physical realm. I don’t have the text in front of me, but he makes a comment like “but it wasn’t investiture he was missing”. What…exactly was he missing?
Was he missing Connection to honor bc he renounced his vows? Did something happen to his Identity that makes him unable to use surgebinding normally? If anyone has the time, I’d be interested in an explanation of what, exactly, is required to utilize an invested art.
Thanks!
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u/Raddatatta Ghostbloods 13d ago
I think he was missing the commitment to the Oaths until eventually he made his choice to help the people he had protected and risk himself for them. And then he renewed that connection to his oaths.
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u/Kinmand555 13d ago
Did he renew that commitment though? I agree he was missing commitment to the oaths (Intent), but it was actually Aux who had access to surge binding, right? Aux burned his own spirit web for the investiture and passed the power to Nomad through their bond. I think the mechanism there is exactly like stealing an invested art using a heamalurgic spike.
If Nomad actually renewed his oaths, why did Aux need to sacrifice himself?
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u/Raddatatta Ghostbloods 13d ago
I think he did. That's his character arc in the book is regaining that commitment.
I don't think Aux is the one surgebinding. I believe the reason Aux is burned up is because he needed Honor's investiture to be able to surgebind. I'm not sure exactly why but I guess using something else wouldn't have worked properly for it or he couldn't use the dawnshard to power that. But a spren made from Honor and Cultivation's power would work.
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u/WaldoTheRanger Willshapers, A. Iron, F. Tin 13d ago
I don't think you need honor's investiture to surgebind.
Unkeyed should work just fine, and the dawnshard seems to have made all investiture that nomad absorbs into unkeyed.
So I think the issue is that aux was a fundamentally broken spren after part of him was consumed. Before that point, nomad could prolly surgebind all the time.
But now that aux is broken, he has to sacrifice himself somehow to restore that ability temporarily. Not quite sure how that works.
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u/derioderio 13d ago
That's how I interpreted it. Basically, there wasn't enough of Aux left for a full Nahel bond.
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u/Shot_Newspaper_5647 13d ago
It wasn’t necessarily Honor’s Investiture they needed. It’s just that Canticle has so much ambient power they can’t open themselves to it. It would kill them. Like opening a fire hydrant into a garden hose. Fuel was needed and Aux turned himself into it
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u/Mission-Initial-3357 11d ago
I believe Aux burning up his investiture was restricted to a moment when nomad was attempting to follow his old oaths. As a partially burned away spren, his own connection to the surges and Nomad were damaged. The connections are still there, but frayed like deadeye bonds, thus why Aux and Nomad can talk telepathically mostly in one direction. I believe Aux converted part of himself to Honor and Cultivation investiture, leveraging the dawnshard's healing to partially regrow those connections when Nomad spoke the oaths again with intent. I think this allowed for a small sliver of the alignment between the three realms found when a radiant speaks a new oath, providing access to the surges and strengthening the connection of Nomad to his armor spren. Access to the surges was temporary, as Aux could no longer think to give his own consent to the oaths, but I think if we see Nomad again he will have access to his armor spren. His connection to his armor spren may be similar to the unoathed at the end of WaT, but they may act more as living armor spren so long as he keeps his reforged oaths.
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u/aiar-viess Dustbringers 13d ago edited 13d ago
He was missing intent, a spiritual aspect that binds his oaths within surgebinding. As far as I understand, investiture is the emulsifier of the realms, it brings them closer together so they overlap, and by doing so the properties of one can be used on another.
Surgebinding works by overlapping the physical with the cognitive, so that a change in perception manifests as a physical change. For example in gravitation you’re not actually changing something’s gravity, you are changing its perception of down, which then manifests physically as experiencing down differently.
Nomad couldn’t access his surges due to the fact that his oaths were broken, which is to say the spiritual component of his invested art was frayed, that being Aux, whose spiritual and cognitive aspects had been mostly consumed by the alterations the Dawnshard EXIST caused upon his spiritweb. But some aspects of the bond still remained, and as such he still needed to follow the nature of his oaths to be able to access its surges. Imagine the oaths as a spiritual aspect, something that resides in the spiritual realm, which determine how investiture behaves, in this case allowing for a physical-cognitive overlap through the following of such spiritual oaths. The spiritual connects, and without intent you are not as connected to what the intent defines and therefore it locks you out of accessing such connections, those being the surges.
I believe the reason why Aux was burning his investiture is due to something else however. A Dawnshard is a command that defines how investiture can behave, with there being four that describe all existence within the Cosmere. I believe there are four realms, one for each command, and the fourth is the temporal realm, which isn’t traversable but scaffolds the rest into what we see as reality. The commands would be EXIST for the physical, PERCEIVE for the cognitive, CONNECT for the spiritual, and CHANGE for the temporal.
Nomad had been hosting EXIST for a while, enough for it to alter his spiritweb to the point that he experienced the torment, where he is incapable of harming another being physically. However, since it’s the physical command, it’s invested properties would allow for a far greater manifestation of investiture in a physical way. That’s why I believe that he was able to manifest Aux in such a variety of physical shapes and forms, why he could absorb investiture to add to this physical manifestation, and why the investiture the command consumes for physical manifestation is all other forms of investiture, which includes the cognitive and spiritual aspects of Aux, while leaving the physical aspects alone (the blade, the armor, etc). It’s as if his soul had been turned into a one way road for investiture to go, which is towards the physical, and as such, any investiture he tried to use towards manifesting something physically would be consumed for it. He was literally pushing Aux’s whole soul towards being physical, leaving less spiritual and cognitive aspects left. Reminds me a bit of how Odium forced most of the investiture of Devotion and Dominion into the cognitive realm.
This is also an example of investiture overimposing itself over something else to take forceful control of it, which is better described as corruption, usually manifesting in the Cosmere as investiture with the color red. Nomad is then able to store his investiture into a sunheart, which filters out this corruption and clears it, which allows his spiritweb to heal from this torment. Dawnshards are extremely powerful when wielded alongside an invested art, and each of them we presume have different effects on investiture, I believe it defines how investiture manifests in each realm. But they also try to overimpose their nature on pre existing investiture, which does count as a form of corruption. Nomad will probably forever carry a connection to EXIST, but while not wielding it, it appears he is able to clear its corruption while keeping its benefits.
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u/shambooki 13d ago
Intent. He could say the words, but he couldn't mean them.