Chapter Thirty-Eight Part Four

So, my favorite secret in the novel is the fact that the Lord Ruler is actually Rashek. I’m still not sure if this revelation will mean as much to readers as I want it to–it depends on them reading, and caring, about the story that happened in the past. However, when it all comes together, I think it really pays off.

So, the concept that started me on this book was “What if the Dark Lord won?” I thought about that, then figured it would be more scary if the hero had become the Dark Lord–only something worse. Kind of a “What if Frodo kept the ring?” idea. Well, I eventually decided to twist that into a “What if Sam killed Frodo and took the ring, then became a Dark Lord?” Like Kelsier says, there’s always another secret.

The story, of course, grew into much more from there. The interaction between Rashek and Alendi (the unnamed hero from the logbook) was interesting enough to me that I decided to give it its own story, told through the chapter bumps. I see this book as actually having three prime viewpoint characters: Vin, Kelsier, and Alendi.

My favorite kinds of revelations are after this nature–things that the reader has been familiar with, yet not quite understanding, the entire book. Things you could have figured out much earlier, if you’d really been paying attention to the right clues.

These clues, then, led to the source of the Lord Ruler’s immortality. It has been foreshadowed that age is one of the things that Feruchemists can store up, and we’ve established that the Lord Ruler can change his age. So, I don’t think it was too great a stretch to make Vin understand that his Feruchemical storages were somehow behind his immortality. You’ll get more explanation of this in the epilogue.

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Finally, we get to have a nice little scene with Vin and Sazed standing over the body of the Lord Ruler. This is another good metaphoric scene, where he has been cast down by the people he sought to oppress, much as the skaa cheering outside have cast down the empire that sought to oppress them. The rising sun outside, of course, is a nod to this.

And the Lord Ruler dies in the same way that Kelsier did, with a spear in the chest while he’s laying on the ground, defeated.