Mistborn Trilogy (Mistborn, #1-3)

by Brandon Sanderson

In almost all cases, the Lord Ruler didn’t need to send his armies to reconquer the rebels. By the time his agents arrived, the groups had overthrown themselves.

“Do not dismiss someone’s beliefs because you do not understand them, Mistress.”

“Prophecies do not have to be a scam, Mistress,” OreSeur said. “Or even, really, a promise for the future. They can simply be an expression of hope.”

Dockson held some of that same hardness. Kell and Dox weren’t evil men, but there was an edge of vengefulness to them. Oppression had changed them in ways that no amount of peace, reformation, or recompense could redeem.

“On that last day,” Vin said. “During the fight with the Inquisitor. Kell protected Elend, who came looking for me.” “Must have thought he was one of the prisoners.” Vin shook her head. “He knew who Elend was, and knew that I loved him. In the end, Kelsier was willing to admit that a good man was worth protecting, no matter who his parents were.” “I find that hard to accept, Vin.” “Why?” Dockson met her eyes. “Because if I accept that Elend bears no guilt for what his people did to mine, then I must admit to being a monster for the things that I did to them.”

Cett shook his head. “Honest men weren’t meant to be kings, lad. It’s a damn shame, but it’s true. That’s why I have to take the throne from you.”

When you can’t have both freedom and safety, which do you choose…?

He would not be like the kings of the past, any more than he would be like Kelsier. He would be Elend Venture. His roots were in philosophy, so he would be remembered as a scholar. He’d best use that to his advantage, or he wouldn’t be remembered at all. No kings could admit their weaknesses, but they were certainly wise to admit their strengths.

He closed his eyes again. The image of Vin stumbling toward him at the end, her beautiful white ball gown covered in the gore of a man she’d just killed with her forehead… She did it to protect me, he thought. But that doesn’t make it any less disturbing. Maybe that even makes it a little more disturbing.

Zane didn’t make sense. He didn’t have to. That was, perhaps, one of the advantages of being insane.

“Elend…” she said, laying a hand on his arm. And he flinched. It was slight, almost unnoticeable, and he covered it quickly. But the damage was done. Damage she had caused, damage within him. He had finally seen—really seen—what she was. He’d fallen in love with a lie.

“Should I have told the lie, Sazed?” Elend asked. “No,” Sazed said, smiling. “Perhaps another man should have, in your same position. But, a man must be cohesive with himself. You have made your decisions in life, and changing yourself at the last moment—telling this lie—would have been against who you are. It is better for you to have done as you did and lost the throne, I think.” Tindwyl frowned. “His ideals are nice, Sazed. But what of the people? What if they die because Elend wasn’t capable of controlling his own conscience?”

“You talk of God, Sazed, but don’t you preach of a hundred different religions?” “Three hundred, actually,” Sazed said. “Well, which one do you believe?” Elend asked. “I believe them all.” Elend shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. You’ve only pitched a half-dozen to me, but I can already see that they’re incompatible.” “It is not my position to judge truth, Lord Venture,” Sazed said, smiling. “I simply carry it.”

“We are not koloss,” the lead koloss suddenly said, turning to Elend as they walked. Elend frowned. “Explain.” “You think we are koloss,” it said through lips that were stretched too tightly to work properly. “We are humans. We will live in your city. We will kill you, and we will take it.” Elend shivered, realizing the source of the mismatched garments. They had come from the village that the koloss had attacked, the one whose refugees had trickled into Luthadel. This appeared to be a new development in koloss thinking. Or, had it always been there, repressed by the Lord Ruler? The scholar in Elend was fascinated. The rest of him was simply horrified.

She was tired of weakness, tired of being restrained. She had spent months as a knife, held immobile at someone’s throat. It was time to cut.

He could finally see what was in her fingers. It was her earring, the simple bronze stud that she always wore. She looked down at it, twisting it between her fingers. “Did I ever tell you how I got this?” she asked. He shook his head. “My mother gave it to me,” she said. “I don’t remember it happening—Reen told me about it. My mother…she heard voices sometimes. She killed my baby sister, slaughtered her. And that same day she gave me this, one of her own earrings. As if…as if choosing me over my sister. A punishment for one, a twisted present for another.”

“At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very different,” Sazed said. “Different in shape, different in function, different in design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination, he might see that without one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both lock and key were created for the same purpose.”

“Time is at a premium these days, Saze.” “When is it not?”

She hadn’t felt such fear in a long time. But now she saw it, felt it, smelled it on herself as she shied away from the approaching Zane. She felt what it was like to face a Mistborn—what it must have been like for those soldiers she’d killed. There was no fighting. There was no chance.

“You must live as a soldier,” Sazed said, pulling something from his sash with a weak hand. “But you can still dream like an artist.

The mists outside were gone; day had finally won. It didn’t seem to have many victories remaining.

She’d never trusted anyone this much. Not Kelsier, not Sazed, not Reen. Elend had everything. That knowledge made her tremble inside. If she lost him, she would lose herself.

“You raised an army of violent monsters and led them in a tyrannical assault, Jastes,” Elend said. “You caused the slaughter of innocent villages. Then, you abandoned that army without leadership or control outside the most populated city in the whole of the Final Empire.” “Forgive me,” Jastes said. Elend looked the man in the eyes. “I forgive you,” he said quietly. Then, in one fluid stroke, he drew his sword and sheared Jastes’s head from his shoulders. “But my kingdom cannot.”

“How did we get here, Clubs?” Breeze asked quietly, still on the floor of the courtyard, before the booming gate. He sat on his horse, amid a muddy mixture of falling snow and ash.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be at the front, Straff thought suddenly. He turned his horse, then noticed something. An arrow suddenly shot from the midst of the charging koloss. But, koloss didn’t use bows. Besides, the monsters were still far away, and that object was far too big to be an arrow anyway. A rock, perhaps? It seemed larger than… It began to fall down toward Straff’s army. Straff stared into the sky, riveted by the strange object. It grew more distinct as it fell. It wasn’t an arrow, nor was it a rock. It was a person—a person with a flapping mistcloak. “No!” Straff yelled. She’s supposed to be gone! Vin screamed down from her duralumin-fueled Steeljump, massive koloss sword light in her hands. She hit Straff directly in the head with the sword, then continued on downward, slamming into the ground, throwing up snow and frozen dirt with the power of her impact. The horse fell into two pieces, front and back. What remained of the former king slid to the ground with the equine corpse. She looked at the remnants, smiled grimly, and bid Straff farewell.

The separate groups stood in the cold. Sazed turned as Vin did, looking at Penrod. Vin pointed at the ground. Penrod quietly dismounted, then bowed himself to the ground. “I swear as well,” he said. “I give my loyalty to Elend Venture.” Vin turned to Lord Cett. “You expect this of me?” the bearded man said, amused. “Yes,” Vin said quietly. “And if I refuse?” Cett asked. “Then I’ll kill you,” Vin said quietly. “You brought armies to attack my city. You threatened my people. I won’t slaughter your soldiers, make them pay for what you did, but I will kill you, Cett.”

The mist almost seemed to live: it moved, swirled, and blew in the cold night air. It snatched up his puffs of breath, as if drawing a piece of him into it.

As he fingered the pages, the flickering candlelight revealed Tindwyl’s firm, yet beautiful, script. It mixed easily with paragraphs written in Sazed’s own, more reserved hand. At times, a page would alternate between their different hands a dozen different times. He didn’t realize that he was crying until he blinked, sending loose a tear, which hit the page. He looked down, stunned as the bit of water caused a swirl in the ink.

I sense a craftiness behind these changes, a manipulation subtle and brilliant. I have spent the last two years in exile, trying to decipher what the alterations could mean. I have come to only one conclusion. Something has taken control of our religion, something nefarious, something that cannot be trusted. It misleads, and it shadows.

Alendi must not reach the Well of Ascension, for he must not be allowed to release the thing that is imprisoned there. Sazed sat back. It was the final blow, the last strike that killed whatever was left of his faith. He knew at that moment that he would never believe again.

It was not yet complete. It needed more. Something else . . . something hidden. And Marsh would find that something, bring it to his master. The master that Vin had freed. The entity that had been imprisoned within the Well of Ascension. It called itself Ruin.

AS ALWAYS, TENSOON’S DAY began in darkness. Part of that was due, of course, to the fact that he didn’t have any eyes. He could have created a set—he was of the Third Generation, which was old, even for a kandra. He had digested enough corpses that he had learned how to create sensory organs intuitively without a model to copy. Unfortunately, eyes would have done him little good. He didn’t have a skull, and he had found that most organs didn’t function well without a full body—and skeleton—to support them. His own mass would crush eyes if he moved the wrong way, and it would be very difficult to turn them about to see.

An easy life taught one very little.

As always, the koloss seemed fascinated—in an enraged, baffled way—with Vin.

This is actually what happened to Rashek, I believe. He pushed too hard. He tried to burn away the mists by moving the planet closer to the sun, but he moved it too far, making the world far too hot for the people who inhabited it. The ashmounts were his solution to this. He had learned that shoving a planet around required too much precision, so instead he caused the mountains to erupt, spewing ash and smoke into the air. The thicker atmosphere made the world cooler, and turned the sun red

“If there were a God, Breeze,” Sazed said, “do you think he’d have let so many people be killed by the Lord Ruler? Do you think he’d have let the world become what it is now? I will not teach you—or anyone—a religion that cannot answer my questions. Never again.”

Vin stopped. Her fingers—made far more sensitive by the tin she was burning to help her eyesight in the dark cavern—brushed against grooves in the plate’s surface. She knelt, leaning close, to find a short inscription carved in the metal, at the bottom, the letters much smaller than the ones up above. Be careful what you speak, it read. It can hear what you say. It can read what you write. Only your thoughts are safe. Vin shivered.

Ash fell as he walked through the camp. Did it ever stop these days? He almost wished that Ruin wouldn’t ever let go of his mind. When his mind was his own, Marsh saw only pain and destruction. When Ruin controlled him, however, the falling ash was a thing of beauty, the red sun a marvelous triumph, the world a place of sweetness in its death.

Sometimes he wondered if the unbirthed—the creatures that the humans called mistwraiths—were more honest than their brothers the kandra.

It is too easy for people to characterize Ruin as simply a force of destruction. Think rather of Ruin as intelligent decay. Not simply chaos, but a force that sought in a rational—and dangerous—way to break everything down to its most basic forms

“Don’t look at me,” the creature said, speaking in a sluggish voice. Its words were slurred, partially from the way its lips were pulled. “What?” Vin asked. “You don’t think I’m human,” the koloss said, speaking slowly, deliberately—like the others she had heard. It was like they had to think hard between each word. “You aren’t human,” Vin said. “You’re something else.” “I will be human,” the koloss said. “We will kill you. Take your cities. Then we will be human.” Vin shivered. It was a common theme among koloss. She’d heard others make similar remarks. There was something very chilling about the flat, emotionless way the koloss spoke of slaughtering people.

“Praise the Survivor!” Demoux said. Vin frowned. At his neck, hanging outside his clothing, Demoux wore a necklace that bore a small silver spear: the increasingly popular symbol of the Church of the Survivor. It seemed odd to her that the weapon that had killed Kelsier would become the symbol of his followers.

“Should I inform Lord Hammond and the others of the meeting’s agenda, my lord?” Elend paused, glancing toward the ashen sky. “Conquering the world, Demoux,” he finally said. “Or, at least, what’s left of it.”

Allomancy was, indeed, born with the mists. Or, at least, Allomancy began at the same time as the mists’ first appearances. When Rashek took the power at the Well of Ascension, he became aware of certain things. Some were whispered to him by Ruin; others were granted to him as an instinctive part of the power. One of these was an understanding of the Three Metallic Arts. He knew, for instance, that the nuggets of metal in the Chamber of Ascension would make those who ingested them into Mistborn. These were, after all, fractions of the very power in the Well itself.

Ruin’s consciousness was trapped by the Well of Ascension, kept mostly impotent. That night, when we discovered the Well for the first time, we found something we didn’t understand. A black smoke, clogging one of the rooms. Though we discussed it after the fact, we couldn’t decide what that was. How could we possibly have known? The body of a god—or, rather, the power of a god, since the two are really the same thing. Ruin and Preservation inhabited power and energy in the same way a person inhabits flesh and blood.

How had Sazed become the one that people came to with their problems? Couldn’t they sense that he was simply a hypocrite, capable of formulating answers that sounded good, yet incapable of following his own advice? He felt lost. He felt a weight, squeezing him, telling him to simply give up.

How easily Elend spoke of hope and humor, as if being happy were simply a decision one made. Some people assumed that it was. Once, Sazed might have agreed with them. Now, his stomach simply twisted, and he felt sick at the thought of taking pretty much any action. His thoughts were constantly invaded by doubts. This is what religion is for, Sazed thought as he tromped through the ash at the head of the column, carrying his pack on his shoulders. It helps people through times like these.

He did not disparage the people who had followed the religions, but Sazed—so far—had found only contradiction and hypocrisy in each religion he studied. Divinity was supposed to be perfect. Divinity didn’t let its followers get slaughtered, and certainly didn’t allow the world to be destroyed by good men who were just trying to save it.

For every Push, there is a Pull. There are no exceptions. It makes simple, logical sense—unlike the ways of men, which are filled with flaws, irregularities, and double meanings. Allomancy is a thing of nature.”

“The longer I’ve held this throne, Vin, the more I’ve come to realize that some of the things the Lord Ruler did weren’t evil, but simply effective. Right or wrong, he maintained order in his kingdom.” Vin looked up, catching his eyes, forcing him to look down at her. “I don’t like this hardness in you, Elend.” He looked out over the blackened canal waters. “It doesn’t control me, Vin. I don’t agree with most of the things the Lord Ruler did. I’m just coming to understand him—and that understanding worries me.”