Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection

by Brandon Sanderson

powers that permeated the landscape.

Their Investiture—their power—was Splintered, their minds ripped away, their souls sent into the Beyond.

The woman they spoke of, Wan ShaiLu, was more than a simple con artist.

She had been bested, betrayed by the Imperial Fool when she’d assumed she could trust him. He had taken her copy of the Moon Scepter and swapped it for the original, then run off.

Read deleted prologue here (Contains spoilers, best read after finishing the final version Emperor's Soul): https://www.brandonsanderson.com/the-emperors-soul-deleted-prologue-imperial-fool/ Imperial Fool is HOID!

They had hair almost as dark as Shai’s, though theirs curled while hers lay straight and long. She tried with some success not to feel dwarfed by them. Her people, the MaiPon, were not known for their stature.

the figure removed his hood, revealing a face with milky white skin and red eyes.

“A Bloodsealer. You invited a Bloodsealer into your palace?”

“Satisfied with having placed one of her creations on the throne. Once, she dared to try to fool thousands—but now she has a chance to fool millions. An entire empire. Exposing what she has done would ruin the majesty of it, in her eyes.”

Hidden among the supplies on his back was the painting that Shai had stolen, again, from Arbiter Frava’s office. A forgery. Shai had never had cause to steal one of her own works before. It felt … amusing. She’d left the large frame cut open with a single Reo rune carved in the center on the wall behind. It did not have a very pleasant meaning.

Her gem, her crowning work, wore the mantle of imperial power. That thrilled her, but the thrill had driven her onward.

she would carefully proceed out of the province and continue on to her next task: tracking down the Imperial Fool, who had betrayed her.

Frava would not find an exploit to control the emperor, because there wasn’t one. The emperor’s soul was complete, locked tight, and all his own. That wasn’t to say that he was exactly the same as he had been.

This isn’t changing his soul. This isn’t making him a different person. It is merely nudging him toward a certain path, much as a con man on the street will strongly nudge his mark to pick a certain card. It is him. The him that could have been.

These were the tears of a man who saw before himself a masterpiece. True art was more than beauty; it was more than technique. It was not just imitation.

In this book, Gaotona found a rare work to rival that of the greatest painters, sculptors, and poets of any era. It was the greatest work of art he had ever witnessed.

He clutched the book, that matchless work of art, and held it out. Then he dropped it into the flames.

Kelsier spun, surprised to find a person standing beside him. Not a figure made of mist, but a man in strange clothing: a thin wool coat that went down almost to his feet, and beneath it a shirt that laced closed, with a kind of conical skirt. That was tied with a belt that had a bone-handled knife stuck through a loop. The man was short, with black hair and a prominent nose. Unlike the other people—who were made of light—this man looked normal, like Kelsier.

Admittedly, though, even he carried one of the newest compasses, wrapped up in his pack with a set of the new sea charts—maps given as gifts by the Ones Above during their visit earlier in the year.

Stopped here last

“They are after something, Dusk. What interest do we hold for them? From what I’ve heard them say, there are many other worlds like ours, with cultures that cannot sail the stars. We are not unique, yet the Ones Above come back here time and time again. They do want something. You can see it in their eyes.…”

“What is that?” Dusk asked, nodding to the thing she took from her pocket. It rested in her palm like the shell of a clam, but had a mirrorlike face on the top.

“It is a machine,” she said. “Like a clock, only it never needs to be wound, ...

“Well, it translates languages. Ours into that of the Ones Above. It also … shows the locations of Aviar.” “What?” “It’s like a map,” she said. “It points the way to Aviar.”

Last left off

“You don’t need to feign innocence, Winds,” Vathi said. “I know you turned it on in my absence.” “But we didn’t.”

“What did you do, then?” Vathi asked them. “We … opened it.”

“We figured,” the man said, “that we should see if we could puzzle out how the machine worked. Vathi, the insides … they’re complex beyond what we could have imagined. But there are seeds there. Things we could—”

“It’s a trap, you see,” he whispered. “The Ones Above have rules. They can’t trade with us until we’re advanced enough. Just like a man can’t, in good conscience, bargain with a child until they are grown. And so, they have left their machines for us to discover, to prod at and poke. The dead man was a ruse. Vathi was meant to have those machines.

“There will be explanations, left as if carelessly, for us to dig into and learn. And at some point in the near future, we will build something like one of their machines. We will have grown more quickly than we should have. We will be childlike still, ignorant, but the laws from Above will let these visitors trade with us. And then, they will take this land for themselves.”

Kokerlii

“We found instructions in the machine,” Vathi whispered. “A manual on its workings, left there as if accidentally by someone who worked on it before. The manual is in their language, but the smaller machine I have…”

“It translates.”

“The manual details how the machine was constructed,” Vathi says. “It’s so complex I can barely comprehend it, but it seems to explain concepts and ideas, ...

“Never move without asking yourself, is this too easy?” she whispered. “You said it was a trap as I was pulled away. When we found the manual, I … Oh, Dusk. They are planning to do to us what … what we are doing to Patji, aren’t they?”

“We’ll lose it all. We can’t fight them. They’ll find an excuse, they’ll seize the Aviar. It makes perfect sense. The Aviar use the worms. We use the Aviar. The Ones Above use us. It’s inevitable, isn’t it?”

This is the symbol of your ignorance. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple.