Over my many years of reading, I’ve heard a lot about an author named Brandon Sanderson. I didn’t really think much about him, except for adding some of his series to my 300+-item-long to-read list and then moving on to reading other books I was more excited about. However, in August, a friend of mine (thank you, Ellie), who is an avid fan of his works, explained the basics of the magic systems in one of his series, and it caught my attention. I’ve read multiple different fantasy books with magic systems, but I hadn’t yet read one quite like this one, where characters have the chance of being born with the innate ability to “burn” certain metals after ingesting them and gain different, temporary powers, with a few being blessed with the ability to burn all the metals instead of just one (called Mistborn). I proceeded to check out the first book of the series, The Final Empire, pretty soon after, and thus began my first journey through the Cosmere (the fictional universe where many of Sanderson’s characters reside).
The Final Empire
The Final Empire is set in a dystopian empire in which the Lord Ruler, an immortal, 1,000-year-old being said to be God himself after having become the “Sliver of Infinity,” has kept a tight control over his population of nobles, descendants of the kings that initially helped him rise to power, and the Skaa, “lesser” people forced to work as slaves for the nobles. Adding on to the dystopia, instead of blue skies, yellow sunlight, and green grass, the world is covered in a blanket of ash that blocks the sky, turns the sunlight red and plants brown.
The basic plot of the book is as follows: A group of Skaa thieves led by a character named Kelsier and their latest recruit, a girl named Vin, set out to topple the empire and free the Skaa from the horrible treatment they experience. They first attempt to do so by raising a large Skaa army to rebel against the Lord Ruler, while also sowing distrust in the nobility by instigating multiple house wars. Vin takes part in this by disguising herself as a lesser nobility and infiltrating balls where she eventually runs into Elend, the heir of the most powerful house, and is, ironically, one of the few nobles who hate the current political system in place. As expected, the rebellion is quickly quelled by the Lord Ruler (you don’t rule an empire for 1,000 years unless you’re really good at suppressing revolutions). Kelsier, in a fit of impulsive rage, completely cripples the economy by destroying the mine where the rarest and most powerful metal, atium, is found. A few days later, at a public event, Kelsier stands off against the Lord Ruler and gets himself killed on purpose, as he knew the Skaa watching would see his sacrifice and his death would ignite another rebellion. The book ends with Vin fighting the Lord Ruler using a lesser-known metal, malatium, to determine his source of power, destroying it, killing the Lord Ruler as a result.
The book has incredible world-building, dynamic characters, and good character relationships. The writing style is interesting, and each character’s point of view is written in such a distinct way that I could flip to a random page in the book and easily figure out whose perspective I was reading. The foreshadowing is also incredible in hindsight because so much of what was explained in the final book, The Hero of Ages, was clearly hinted at since the beginning.
I took a break from the series because I had promised another friend to read a separate series, but the whole time, I couldn’t concentrate because Sanderson expertly left behind multiple loose ends about the world that drew me back to the series. I also, of course, grew attached to the characters and needed to see how they would grow after accomplishing their impossible task of overthrowing a millennia-old empire.
The Well of Ascension
The Well of Ascension is the second book in the series, and it’s about the aftermath of the Collapse. The plot is as follows:
After the Collapse, Elend becomes the king of Luthadel, the capital city of the Final Empire, and attempts to protect his people from the three armies surrounding the city: one led by his brutal father, one by the king from the Western Dominance, and one made up of an army of giants led by Elend’s former friend. Meanwhile, Sazed, another member of the original crew, traverses all across the empire in order to bring about the former religions the Lord Ruler had attempted to erase to the now freed Skaa. He runs into Marsh, Kelsier’s brother, who brings him to a Conventical, a former base for the Lord Ruler’s priests and inquisitors. There, they find a metal plate engraved with a warning and prophecy from an ancient scholar from before the Final Empire. Sazed takes a charcoal rubbing of the engraving before leaving. As the story progresses, Sazed and another begin to decipher and analyze the rubbing while Elend and Vin, along with the rest of the crew, deal with the armies waiting for them outside. A siege inevitably occurs, and Vin, believing herself to be the Hero mentioned in the charcoal rubbing, locates the Well of Ascension, the mystical well of legend containing the power that let the Lord Ruler ascend to “Godhood” to try and stop the incoming devastation. It’s soon revealed that her attempts at freeing the power contained in the Well actually freed a destructive entity named Ruin from its prison. The book concludes with Sazed comparing his charcoal rubbing with the metal engraving and realizing Ruin had made subtle changes in the wording to steer the crew into freeing him.
The Well of Ascension was my favorite book in the trilogy. I didn’t think I would like a book where all the protagonists are completely duped as much as I do, but here we are. The way Sanderson quietly hinted that the words in the charcoal rubbing were being twisted was so well done. Since the start of the series, Sanderson had left little bits of lore at the beginning of chapters. In Well of Ascension, Sanderson puts the original metal engraving in the lore bits before the chapters, causing the reader to question the analysis that Sazed is making versus the actual engraving. I especially enjoyed the fact that the characters were also forced to confront their worst fears and experience parts of their personality that they try to ignore or repress, allowing their true colors to shine. Sanderson also answered a couple of questions that were raised during The Final Empire, but also added significantly more mysteries that drew me in again to finish the trilogy.
The Hero of Ages
The Hero of Ages is the final book in the Mistborn Era 1 trilogy, and is about the struggle the crew goes through fighting Ruin, a formless entity that is bringing about the end of the world, with various natural disasters. The plot of the book is as follows (this will be really confusing because there is a lot of lore that I’m not going through the trouble of trying to explain):
After freeing Ruin, the world around the cast begins to quickly deteriorate. The ash being spewed from the volcanoes rapidly begins to increase in volume, burying the landscape. The Mists, the mysterious and almost sentient fogs that have been around since the Lord Ruler’s ascension, have begun creeping in further and further inland, blocking the sun and preventing any crops from growing in the already ruined ground. On top of everything, increasingly stronger earthquakes have begun to shake the ground with higher frequency. To prepare against the end of their world, Vin and Elend travel around using a series of clues left behind by the Lord Ruler about locations of caches of supplies of lumber, food, water, and more, along with bits of information explaining the nature of Ruin and his counterpart, Preservation. Elend and Vin eventually conquer another nearby city in their search for the final cache, and team up with its leader, a former priest of the Lord Ruler named Yomen. Together, they investigate the nature of Ruin and any possible methods of overcoming this evil. Vin leaves the city to lure away the remaining inquisitors, possessed by Ruin, looking to attack the people. During the fight, she gains the ability to burn the Mists themselves instead of just metals, and literally ascends to godhood to take Preservation’s place (he died a couple of days before for no particular reason), before dying by fighting (and killing) Ruin after he indirectly killed Elend. Sazed, seeing both the bodies of Vin, some mysterious man who he assumed was Ruin because of the black fog leaking out of him, and Elend, connected the dots in the ancient prophecy of a Hero and realized that it was he the prophecy referred to. By touching both the remnants of Vin and Ruin at once, Sazed absorbed both of Preservation’s and Ruin’s powers and ascended to godhood himself, fixing the world using the various information from religions he had collected throughout the years. The book ends with Sazed leaving behind a book explaining everything that happened since Ruin was released for the remaining members of the crew.
So much happened in this book. I genuinely do not know how to cut down this summary any more than I already have. I had no words when I finished it. I knew that in the end, in one way or another, the world would end and the grass would be green and the sky would be blue and everything would be normal. I just did not predict the journey at all. I was hoping that Vin and Elend would survive, a futile hope apparently. How dare I assume that the two MAIN characters would be alive by the end of the book? But it’s mostly fine since my favorite character since The Final Empire, Sazed, literally became God.
Overall, this series was absolutely amazing. 11/10, 6 out of 5 stars. I can’t wait to read more of Sanderson’s books.
Also, if you, as the reader, have read this series as well, please ignore the possible mistakes I made while summarizing the books. I started reading the series in August, and I’m writing this in December.
