The Hero of Ages (Mistborn, #3)

by Brandon Sanderson

It called itself Ruin.

Each time Rashek tried to fix things, he made them worse. He had to change the world’s plants to make them able to survive in the newly harsh environment. Yet that change left the plants less nutritious to humankind. Indeed, the falling ash would make men sick, causing them to cough like those who spent too long mining beneath the earth. So Rashek changed humankind as well, altering them so that they could survive.

disillusionment

“‘By now, the mists have likely come again. Such a foul, hateful thing. Scorn it. Don’t go out in it. It seeks to destroy us all. If there is trouble, know that you can control the koloss and the kandra by use of several people Pushing on their emotions at once. I built this weakness into them. Keep the secret wisely.’”

Be careful what you speak. It can hear what you say. It can read what you write. Only your thoughts are safe.

Rashek soon found a balance in the changes he made to the world—which was fortunate, for his power burned away quickly. Though the power he held seemed immense to him, it was in truth a tiny fraction of something much greater. Of course, he did end up naming himself the “Sliver of Infinity” in his religion. Perhaps he understood more than I give him credit for. In any case, we had him to thank for a world without flowers, where plants grew brown rather than green, and where people could survive in an environment where ash fell from the sky on a regular basis.

The nature of the world is such that when we create something, we often destroy something else in the process.

“Praise the Survivor!” Demoux said. Vin frowned. 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.

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,...

“Green,” Breeze finally said. Sazed turned. “Now that would be a color with style,” Breeze said. “Different. You can’t see green and forget about it—not as you can with black or brown. Wasn’t Kelsier always talking about plants being green once? Before the Ascension of the Lord Ruler, before the first time the Deepness came upon the land?”

Rashek moved the Well of Ascension, obviously. It was clever of him—perhaps the cleverest thing he did. He knew that the power would one day return to the Well, for power such as this—the fundamental power by which the world was formed—does not simply run out. It can be used, and therefore diffused, but it will always be renewed. So, knowing that rumors and tales would persist, Rashek changed the very landscape of the world. He put mountains in what became the North, and named that location Terris. Then he flattened his true homeland, and built his capital there. He constructed his palace around that room at its heart, the room where he would meditate, the room that was a replica of his old hovel in Terris. A refuge created during the last moments before his power ran out.

Vin watched the others contemplate, and realize—if they hadn’t already—the horror of what was upon them. It’s like Alendi’s logbook said, she thought. They couldn’t fight the Deepness with armies. It destroyed cities, bringing a slow, terrible death. They were helpless.

We can fight armies, we can capture cities, but what of ash, mists, and earthquakes? What about the world falling apart around us?

“Then there’s one last thing I need to ask of you all.” “And what is that?” Cett asked. Elend stood for a few moments, looking over their heads, appearing thoughtful. “I want you to tell me about the Survivor,” he said.

Elend nodded slowly. “I wish I could have known him. Early in my career, I always compared myself to him. By the time I heard of Kelsier, he was already becoming a legend. It was unfair to force myself to try to be him, but I worried regardless. Anyway, those of you who knew him, maybe you can answer another question for me. What do you think he’d say, if he saw us now?” “He’d be proud,” Ham said immediately. “I mean, we defeated the Lord Ruler, and we built a skaa government.”

“He’d tell us to laugh more,” Sazed whispered.

Breeze chuckled. “He was completely insane, you know. The worse things got, the more he’d joke.

very first meeting after one of our worst defeats, when we lost most of our skaa army to that fool Yeden. Kell walked in, a spring in his...

He always said that laughter was something the Lord Ruler couldn’t take from him.

He planned and executed the overthrow of a thousand-year empire—and he did it as a kind of penance for letting his wife die thinking that he hated her. But he did it all with a smirk on his lips. Like every joke was his way of slapping fate in the face.”

“We can survive this,” Elend said, determination in his voice. “But the only way that will happen is if our people don’t give up. They need leaders who laugh, leaders who feel that this fight can be won. So, this is what I ask of you. I don’t care if you’re an optimist or a pessimist—

I

don’t care if secretly you think we’ll all be dead before the month ends. On the outside I want to see you smiling. Do it in defiance if you have to. If the end does come, I want this group t...

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 it was. How could we possibly have known? It was part of 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.

He approached a large intersection and looked both ways down the crossed streets—the view clear as day to his eyes. I may not be Mistborn, and I may not be emperor, he thought. But I’m something. Something new. Something Kelsier would be proud of.

Maybe this time I can help.

The ash. I don’t think the people really understood how fortunate they were. During the thousand years before the Collapse, they pushed the ash into rivers, piled it up outside cities, and generally let it be. They never understood that without the microbes and plants Rashek had developed to break down the ash particles, the land would quickly have been buried. Though of course that did eventually happen anyway.

The mists were her enemy.

They are called Allomantic savants. Men or women who flare their metals so long, and so hard, that the constant influx of Allomantic power transforms their very physiology. In most cases, with most metals, the effects of this are slight. Seekers, for instance, often become bronze savants without knowing it. Their range is simply expanded from burning the metal so long. Becoming a pewter savant is dangerous, as it requires pushing the body so hard in a state where one cannot feel exhaustion or pain. Most accidentally kill themselves before the process is complete, and in my opinion the benefit isn’t worth the effort. Tin savants, however … they are something special. Endowed with senses beyond what any normal Allomancer would need or want, they become slaves to what they touch, hear, see, smell, and taste. Yet the abnormal power of these senses gives them a distinct and interesting advantage. One could argue that, like an Inquisitor who has been transformed by a Hemalurgic spike, the Allomantic savant is no longer human.

As he’d once told Vin, burning tin wasn’t about what one could sense, but about what one could ignore.

The subtlety displayed in the ash-eating microbes and enhanced plants shows that Rashek got better and better at using the power. It burned out in a matter of minutes—but to a god, minutes can pass like hours. During that time, Rashek began as an ignorant child who shoved a planet too close to the sun, grew into an adult who could create Ashmounts to cool the air, then finally became a mature artisan who could develop plants and creatures for specific purposes. It also shows his mindset during his time with Preservation’s power. Under its influence he was clearly in a protective mode. Instead of leveling the Ashmounts and trying to push the planet back into place, he was reactive, working furiously to fix problems that he himself had caused.

Rashek didn’t solve all the world’s problems. In fact, with each thing he did fix, he created new issues. However, he was clever enough that every subsequent problem was smaller than the ones before it. So instead of plants that died from the distorted sun and ashy ground, we got plants that didn’t provide quite enough nutrition. He did save the world. True, the near-destruction was his fault in the first place—but he did an admirable job, all things considered. At least he didn’t release Ruin to the land as we did.

The figure stepped forward, becoming more than a silhouette. Flames played against the man’s firm face, and Spook’s suspicions were confirmed. There was a reason he’d trusted that voice, a reason he had done what it had said. He would do anything this man commanded. “I didn’t give you pewter just so you could live, Spook,” Kelsier said, pointing. “I gave it to you so you could get revenge. Now, go!”

It should be no surprise that Elend became such a powerful Allomancer. It is a well-documented fact—though that documentation wasn’t available to most—that Allomancers were much stronger during the early days of the Final Empire. In those days, an Allomancer didn’t need duralumin to take control of a kandra or koloss. A simple Push or Pull on the emotions was enough. In fact, this ability was one of the main reasons that the kandra devised their Contracts with the humans—for at that time not only Mistborn, but Soothers and Rioters could take control of them at the merest of whims.

The Deepness must be destroyed. I have seen it, and I have felt it. This name we give it is too weak a word, I think. Yes, it is deep and unfathomable, but it is also terrible. Many do not realize that it is sapient, but I have sensed its mind, such as it is, the few times I have confronted it directly.

Yet Ruin is not omnipotent, Vin thought. If it were, there would have been no fight. It wouldn’t have needed to trick me into releasing it. It cannot know my thoughts.…

But she was also becoming more and more comfortable with the idea of doing what was necessary, no matter how distasteful. She was no longer solely her own person. She belonged to the New Empire. She had been its knife—now it was time to try a different role. I have to do it, she thought, sitting in the red sunlight. There is a puzzle here—something to be solved. What was it Kelsier liked to say? There’s always another secret.

She remembered Kelsier standing boldly before a small group of thieves, proclaiming that they would overthrow the Lord Ruler and free the empire. We’re thieves, he’d said. And we’re extraordinarily good ones. We can rob the unrobbable and fool the unfoolable. We know how to take an incredibly large task and break it down to manageable pieces, then deal with each of those pieces.

When he’d written up the team’s goals and plans on a small board, Vin had been amazed by how possible he had made an impossible task seem. That day, a small part of her had begun to bel...

“There has to be a balance, Vin,” he said. “Somehow we’ll find it. The balance between who we wish to be and who we need to be.” He sighed. “But for now,” he said, looking to the canal, “we have to be satisfied with who we are.”

The beads of metal found at the Well—beads that made men into Mistborn—were the reason Allomancers used to be more powerful. Those first Mistborn were as Elend Venture became—possessing a primal power, which was then passed down through the lines of the nobility, weakening a bit with each generation. The Lord Ruler was one of these ancient Allomancers, his power pure and unadulterated by time and breeding. That is part of why he was so mighty compared to other Mistborn—though admittedly his ability to mix Feruchemy and Allomancy was what produced many of his most spectacular abilities. Still, it is interesting to me that one of his “divine” powers—his essential Allomantic strength—was something every one of the original nine Allomancers possessed.

During the early days of Kelsier’s original plan, I remember how much he confused us all with his mysterious “Eleventh Metal.” He claimed that there were legends of a mystical metal that would let one slay the Lord Ruler—and that Kelsier had located that metal through intense research. Nobody really knew what he did in the years between his escape from the Pits of Hathsin and his return to Luthadel. When pressed, he simply said that he had been in “the West.” Somehow in his wanderings he discovered stories that no Keeper had ever heard. Most of the crew didn’t know what to make of the legends he spoke of. This might have been the first seed that made even his oldest friends begin to question his leadership.

I now believe that Kelsier’s stories, legends, and prophecies about the “Eleventh Metal” were fabricated by Ruin. Kelsier was looking for a way to kill the Lord Ruler, and Ruin—ever subtle—provided a way. That secret was indeed crucial. Kelsier’s Eleventh Metal provided the clue we needed to defeat the Lord Ruler. However, even in this we were manipulated. The Lord Ruler knew Ruin’s goals, and would never have released him from the Well of Ascension. So Ruin needed other pawns—and for that to happen, the Lord Ruler needed to die. Our greatest victory was shaped by Ruin’s subtle fingers.

The Balance. Is it real? We’ve almost forgotten this small piece of lore. Skaa used to talk about it, before the Collapse. Philosophers discussed it a great deal in the third and fourth centuries, but by Kelsier’s time it was mostly a forgotten topic. But it was real. There was a physiological difference between skaa and nobility. When the Lord Ruler altered humankind to make them more capable of dealing with ash, he changed other things as well. Some groups of people—the noblemen—were created to be less fertile, but taller, stronger, and more intelligent. Others—the skaa—were made to be shorter, hardier, and to have many children. The changes were slight, however, and after a thousand years of interbreeding, the differences had largely been erased.

The Lord Ruler didn’t hate his people, and he wouldn’t want them to die out, even if he were defeated. He left food, water, supplies. And if he knew secrets, he would have hidden them in the caches. There will be something here. There has to be.

I am only beginning to understand the brilliance of the Lord Ruler’s cultural synthesis. One of the benefits afforded him by being both immortal and—for all relevant purposes—omnipotent was a direct and effective influence on the evolution of the Final Empire. He was able to take elements from a dozen different cultures and apply them to his new “perfect” society. For instance, the architectural brilliance of the Khlenni builders is manifest in the keeps that the high nobility construct. Khlenni fashion sense—suits for gentlemen, gowns for ladies—is another thing the Lord Ruler decided to appropriate. I suspect that despite his hatred of the Khlenni people—of whom Alendi was one—Rashek had a deep-seated envy of them as well. The Terris of the time were pastoral herdsmen, the Khlenni cultured cosmopolitans. However ironic, it is logical that Rashek’s new empire would mimic the high culture of the people he hated.

spren,

“They say you’ll stop the ash,” the old man said quietly from behind. “Turn the sun yellow again. They call you Heir of the Survivor. Hero of Ages.”