First Trilogy

Well, that’s my first trilogy. I think I improved quite a bit as I wrote these books, and hopefully this ending will satisfy my readers. The inevitable question is going to be “Will there be more Mistborn books?” The answer is “Probably.” However, know a few things.

First off, the next series—if I do it—will not include Vin or Elend. They’re dead. That’s just the way it is. Sorry.

Sazed might make an appearance. He is God, after all. TenSoon is still around. (Sazed stuck the spikes back into him and the other kandra.) Marsh may or may not make an appearance. (I haven’t decided if he will survive or not.)

Spook, Ham, and Breeze probably won’t make an appearance, though, as I would plan to write the next series some five hundred years after the events in this trilogy. (Remember, TenSoon—as a kandra—is immortal. Marsh is also functionally immortal, as he’s both a Feruchemist and an Allomancer, and can combine the powers to reverse his aging. Assuming he has enough atium left from that batch he stole to keep it up for a while, and assuming he managed to grab some cover before the world ended.)

However, this won’t be for some time. I’ve got other projects I want to do, not the least of which is Warbreaker and (probably) its sequel. After that, I want to try a longer series, maybe a five- or six-book one. [Editor’s note: Brandon was referring to the Dragonsteel series, which he’s now put off in favor of the Stormlight Archive, book one of which, The Way of Kings, comes out on August 31, 2010.]

We shall see.

Parting Thoughts

What are my parting thoughts on this series? Well, honestly, they’re “Damn, that turned out well.”

It was my first series. I began the first book the year I sold Elantris, back before I’d met my wife. I’m writing these annotations in December of 2007, with my first child being about a month old. Mistborn has dominated my life for some four years.

I love these characters. I am thrilled with how the world turned out. And the plot . . . well, it just all worked out even better than I’d hoped. I worry about being able to top this—but then, I always worry about that.

A book is a window into the author’s soul, and there was a lot of soul-searching in these books. My thoughts and fears about leadership, religion, relationships, and the nature of truth all show up in the interactions of the characters.

These books are part of me. But now they’re part of you too. Thank you so much for reading.

Brandon Sanderson

The Mistborn Project

May 2003-December 2007

(For now.)

The End

This epilogue ties up a few loose ends, then sets up a couple of others. Much like most of my endings. At least now you know how Vin Snapped. Many people have wondered this, so I thought I should include it somewhere in the book.

Here, with Vin and Elend in the flowers, is where I could have made them survive, if I’d wanted to. I could have patched everything up and given the “happy” ending a lot of people wanted. But . . . well, I just couldn’t. It didn’t feel right. Anyway, I agree with Sazed. They deserve to rest. I added the line about him having spoken with them to soften the blow of their deaths somewhat and give confirmation of a pleasant afterlife for them.

This chapter is a reminiscence, in a way. Since book one I’ve promised a return to green plants and a blue sky, and it was always my intention to make good on that promise. I think it’s sometimes hard for people to remember that in the Final Empire, the plants were brown and the sky red. I don’t think that matters so much, as I believe Spook and Breeze’s reactions—and the descriptions—in this chapter work to provide the proper impact.

Flowers have been another thread, along with the little picture that Kelsier carried around in book one. I’m glad I was able to weave that back in, though it was an afterthought. (As was adding it into this book from the early chapters with Vin and Sazed together.)

That first line of Sazed’s book was not an afterthought. It can be found as the very first epigraph of this book. I am, unfortunately, the Hero of Ages.

Yes, Sazed. You are.

Sazed Ascendant

The answer is yes, I planned it from the beginning. And I didn’t.

It’s difficult for me, even as the author, to trace back when and where the various threads of a story began. I wrote all three of these books in a row, and to me, they’re one long story. Yes, I chose three distinct segments of time over the five-year span, and separated out those chunks. But it’s all part of a whole, which is why it was so important for me to be able to write this series as one singular book.

So, if I go back to my very first notes, will it include a discussion of Sazed becoming God and using the stories in his metalminds as guidelines for remaking the world? No, I don’t think it’s there. Just like Kelsier wasn’t originally planning to create a rebellion through his sacrifice, just like Vin wasn’t even originally female.

Things change and grow with a book as you write it. However, let me say that I knew early in the series that I wanted Sazed to end up as the Hero of Ages and ascend with the power. I felt it was the only way to deal with the world ending and have it start anew. Plus, he’s the only one who really deserved it, as he was the only one of the characters who ever cared much about religion.

I kept this in mind while revising the first book, as I’d finished the rough draft of book three by that time. I planned how to use his religions and feature them in the novels in a way that would show off their finer qualities.

In a way, this is my compromise. As I’ve said, I don’t believe in the “spokes on the wheel” theory. Not every religion can be true, if only because they—logically—disagree on so many points. But every one of them can teach things that are true. This is something I actually believe. And, like many of my beliefs, it ended up influencing how I wrote this book.

A Couple of Small Notes

Yes, Demoux survives, as I promised to Micah. Also, Ruin—like Preservation—dropped a body when he died. This is important, but I can’t give you a decent explanation of why that is at the moment.

Vin’s Sacrifice

Killing Elend and leaving Vin alive would have been, in my opinion, more tragic than what happened. As I establish in a little bit, there is an afterlife in this cosmology. Better for them both to die and to be together.

There were only two ways that Ruin could have died in this book. The first would be to have him give up his life as Preservation did. I don’t think that was very likely.

The second way is the one I’ve been subtly pushing the reader toward from the very beginning of the novel. Ruin and Preservation are opposites. Equal, particularly while Ruin doesn’t have access to the chunk of his power trapped in the atium. The only way, then, for him to be killed would be for Preservation to smash his power against that of Ruin and destroy both of them. It’s a form of balance. Either you block and stop each other, warding each other away, or you overlap and destroy one another.

This was the role Preservation chose Vin to play all those years ago. As she surmises, he needed someone to do what he could not. He had been too corrupted by his power, and could not destroy Ruin. If Vin had held the power for millennia as Preservation had before her, then she too would have lost the ability to destroy Ruin.

It needed to be someone fresh to the power, still separate enough from it to be able to kill Ruin. Preservation knew that if he did not sacrifice himself and let someone else take up the power, then Ruin would eventually win and the world would end. Imprisoning Ruin was always only intended to be a delaying tactic.

The delay was so that the power could find a new person to bear it. Someone who could do what Preservation could not.

Elend’s Death

I rewrote Elend’s death scene a number of times. In the first draft, it happened much more quickly. He and Marsh met, Elend’s atium ran out, and Marsh cut him down. Elend always got his “we’ve won” line, but Human wasn’t getting viewpoints, so we didn’t cut there. Nor did we have Vin fuel Elend’s metals or have him burn duralumin and atium at the same time.

I just felt he needed more. Part of this was due to the reactions of alpha readers, and part of it was due to my own desire to make his last scene more dramatic. I wanted there to be a closeness between him and Vin at the end, and I also had too many people asking what would happen if you burned duralumin and atium at the same time to ignore that possibility.

So, I rewrote several times, eventually landing at this version. As for why I killed him . . . well, for the same reason that I kill any character in one of my books. It just felt like the right thing to do. It’s hard to explain when we get down to specifics like this. On one hand, the rational side of me can explain that there need to be casualties to make victory worth something, and Vin needed to lose Elend so that she’d be willing to do what she had to in order to kill Ruin. Logic says that this book was about Vin and Elend defeating Ruin no matter what the cost to themselves, and allowing them to give their lives for the victory was noble and completed their character arcs.

Emotion, however, is what drove me—not logic. It just felt like the right thing to do. It was the right ending for the book. Now, I could have chosen a different ending. I know that I could have. It would have felt contrived to me, and would have lacked bite. Yet perhaps readers would have liked it better. I honestly don’t know what doing this (killing both of my main characters) will do to my readership and if people will still want to buy my books after this. The founder and president of Tor Books, I know, would have preferred that I didn’t kill my two main characters.

But in the end, I went with what I knew was the better ending. By doing this, at the very least I’ve earned something. From now on, readers will know that nobody is safe in my books—and that will create tension, will make the novels feel more real. (Note that I didn’t do this because I wanted to make readers feel that way. It’s just a side effect.)

Either way, this is where this book was pushing from the beginning. Vin and Elend followed in Kelsier’s footsteps. They were both ready to give their lives, and in doing so, saved those they love. In my opinion, that’s not a tragic or sad ending. It’s just an honest one.

Charging Them Is Madness

Vin probably should have figured out what Elend was doing, being kind of a god now and all. (Or at least she has a fraction of a god inside of her.) However, remember a few things.

She doesn’t know that many of Elend’s troops have been turned into Allomancers. She’s also been very distracted lately. On top of that, the man she loves is charging two hundred thousand koloss. Even if she’d connected that he’d be burning atium, her opinion would still have been that he couldn’t fight that many and survive.

In the end, she was right. So her concern was warranted.

Atium Doesn’t Solve Everything

One of the things I also wanted to do before the series was done was show someone burning atium without regard for it running out. I wanted to show the awesome power of the metal. And then I wanted to have them lose.

Why? Many reasons. Because violence may work to solve some problems, but it isn’t always the answer. In fact, it’s often a poor answer, even if it’s the only answer. (As it was for Elend.) Killing koloss doesn’t solve anything in the long run.

Yes, atium is amazing. Yes, showing it off like this was inevitable in the book. However, I figured that most fantasy novels would get to a point where the character drew on the ultimate hidden weapon, and then would save the day. I didn’t want to do that. Not just because I like to do the unexpected, but because it didn’t fit what I wanted to say with this book. It didn’t fit what felt right.

A twist is no good if it’s just there to be a twist.

Human Enters the Tunnels

And here we also get some Human viewpoints. I believe I mentioned that he’d be returning. I didn’t manage to do very much with him, but my alpha readers demanded something. (These two short scenes with him, as well as the epigraph saying he’d be back, were added in a later draft.) I figured that he deserved a little more screen time after what he’d done for the team, and I had wanted to show the koloss bursting in on the Trustwarren. This seemed like a perfect answer to both problems.

As I’ve said, I wished I could work Human in a little bit more. At least this lets us give him a parting goodbye.

Prophecy

I wasn’t certain how I wanted to treat prophecy in this book. On one hand, it’s a staple of fantasy books—and my goal in this series was to take the fantasy staples and turn them upon their heads in a way that hadn’t been done before. That meant I needed to include and use them, and so I did. In book two, the prophecies turned out to be false, and Ruin used them to trick Vin into releasing him.

However, the fact that he twisted the prophecies left me with the implication that they had once been true. What does that mean, though? If you look at prophecies in our own religions, very few of them are used like fantasy prophecies. In fantasy novels, it seems like prophecies are intentionally obscure, abstract things intended to confuse people and act as some kind of twisted guidebook for the hero to live his life. Yet, in modern religion—specifically Judaism and Christianity—prophecy is more general. Prophecy in these religions means things like “in the end, the faithful will win.” They’re general or symbolic. Of more use to the population as a whole, rather than applying to one distinct individual.

Sazed and Tindwyl have a great discussion about this in book two. Regardless, I make use of the prophecies here in the final book. As far as I’m concerned, they were given to the original Terris people by Preservation as a means of maintaining hope. They were a promise—a hero will come; that hero will protect you. Have faith.

Using the Atium

I hope that the use of all that atium in this chapter was spectacular enough for you—after all, I waited three books to finally have them find the Lord Ruler’s cache. I think that discovering it before this moment would have been anticlimactic. In books one or two, it would simply have meant wealth. The characters getting rich is all well and good, but I think that would have meant a letdown for the reader. All of that anticipation for something so mundane?

Instead, I wanted to use an entire army’s—or at least a large platoon’s—worth of Allomancers burning atium to fight two hundred thousand koloss.

Sazed Sees Mistwraiths

I worry that I didn’t get to show mistwraiths very much in this book. It’s not that big of an issue—they’re only a minor world feature, and are only tangentially important. Still, they’re a part of the kandra past and culture, and I want readers to understand what they are and what they have to do with the kandra life cycle.

Remember, all of the kandra save for the First Generation were born first as mistwraiths. That race of creatures breeds true, and has only a fifty-year lifespan. They die off, but birth new members. Taking one of those new members and adding spikes to them, however, awakens them and brings them sentience. They’re part human, just like the koloss who remember having once been human.

Don’t Try This at Home

As for the Resolution—the kandra mass suicide—well, don’t try this at home, kids. This is one of the more discomforting parts of the book, and I don’t want to advocate religious extremism in this way. Remember, this is a fantasy book—just like you shouldn’t try jumping off your house and using a coin to Push off of, you shouldn’t participate in mass-suicide death cults. The kandra had special circumstances, as they were in the process of being taken over by a dark god when they killed themselves.

The thing you can try is what Sazed did, actively using his religion and calling upon a higher power to bring him help. This is one of the core tenets of many religions—that we, as humans, cannot do all things on our own and need the help of others. I’m not exactly sure (again) what I’m trying to say by having Vin be the one who answers and saves Sazed. But, well, in this theology she’s now his god, so I guess it all makes sense. Strangely.

Her Eyes Lingered Fondly

If you’ve been keeping track, this Terriswoman is, indeed, the romantic interest I promised Micah DeMoux by the end of the book. He said he didn’t care if he ended up with an important character—that didn’t matter to him. He just wanted Captain Demoux to find romance. It took some working, but I managed to work it in. The story behind this is, of course, Captain Demoux and his troops showing up to lend organization and authority to the Terris people, who had been flooded with refugees.

Demoux and his men created law and order, stopping the petty theft and the like that had been a problem with the refugee bands. He essentially took command of the entire place, though he was very respectful to the Terris leaders. This woman, daughter of one of the Terris elders, fell in love with Demoux for his honor and his respectability, and he began to reciprocate.

Even as the world neared its end, she and Demoux were able to find love.

Testing the Mistfallen

Originally, I didn’t have Elend have Demoux and his soldiers take a look at their metals until a little later on. Alpha readers correctly noted this, however, pointing out that it was one of the very first connections they made. I had to put it off mostly for dramatic reasons, which you’ll see in the next chapter, but I decided I could insert these few lines of Elend telling the men to go test themselves to see if they were Allomancers.