A very interesting tidbit about Astra Malorum is that if you play as either Dempsey or Maya, you'll be able to hear the voice of Veytharion in your head. There's a couple of convos between Veytharion and the two in-game, but for this post I'll point out these two:
DEMPSEY: Hey, Shady – you still hitchin' a ride in my head?
VEYTHARION: It is unavoidable. Your memories meshed with mine, and now some of me… resides in you. [link]MAYA: You're still there, aren't ya? Are you why I've felt weird ever since you re-juiced me?
VEYTHARION: You passed through the Loom. We share the same tapestry now. [link]
We can determine through these quotes that the act of a Shadowsmith gathering, then later restoring ones' Spiritus also intrinsically causes the Shadowsmith to bond with whomever they restore (or at the very least, this is the case for Veytharion). Since we see Caltheris restore Nikolai and Grey's Spiritus at the end of Astra Malorum, it's possible she bonded with them as well, and we might hear her reach out to both of them in either DLC2 or 3 (depending on if wherever the Warden dragged our crew inhibits their ability to contact the rest of the Dark Aether).
It was already assumed that most of the season is going to follow a similar routine narratively (with a pause in this upcoming map where we have to break out from somewhere); confront a Shadowsmith and restore one of Requiem and nu-OGs. But, with this info, it might go a little deeper than that. We might also be bonding all of our characters to a Shadowsmith, kinda like how we bonded with the demons in Vanguard with each of the Field Upgrade artifacts, hearing their voices in our heads and offering us a guiding hand. In the next few DLC, we should expect the last 2 Shadowsmiths to bond with Carver, Weaver, Richtofen and Takeo.
This has some interesting implications for the future of the story… my main question is, is this permanent? In Vanguard we knew of methods to separate bonds between demons and their human hosts, like we do to Von List and Kortifex during The Archon. But these Shadowsmiths seem to be older, and far more powerful than those demons… given Veytharion claims they "wove all of creation". They may not be as weak to these spells of unbinding that other entities were.
VEYTHARION: My kind wove all of creation from nothingness. We call my sister Caltheris, the Needle. [link]
Obviously all eight of the crew are trying to get their souls back AND get back to their respective worlds, and presumably Weaver, Grey and Carver at least do this since we see them dead during MWZ (assuming that's not a different timeline… but that's a different conversation for another day). But will having a Shadowsmith bound to them complicate things? Will they take a piece of the Shadowsmiths with them when they leave? Is this going to inhibit their ability to leave the Dark Aether? And, of course, do the Shadowsmiths even want to be separated? Let me know what you guys think.