Mistborn: The Hero of Ages

Oh My God… That was crazy… I’m left at a loss for words, yet have no doubt I’ll have no trouble writing a lot of them. If you haven’t read the Mistborn series yet, do it. Now. I can wait while you read 1500+ pages of intricate storytelling. There will be way too many spoilers here, for everything is revealed in this final book. And I mean EVERYTHING.

Spoiler warning for Mistborn: The Hero of Ages

Planning

It’s crazy that Preservation wanted to enter Vin from the point she had carried the power in the Well of Ascension. But Preservation couldn’t because of her earring. Ruin had so many plans, he somehow planned everything so that the Lord Ruler would be killed just in time before the Well returned to power. He had to find someone that could hear the Well with some enhanced sense of bronze. Which he did by having Vin’s mother kill her sister, a Seeker. Then, when Vin had her earring in, which Kelsier told her to keep in, she could pierce copperclouds. Vin was special, but her abilities weren’t beyond impossible. She got Preservation’s power when Marsh gained a flash of control over Ruin and ripped it out. Those last 100 pages or so where a joy to read and I’m sad that I can’t read them again for the first time. All this time, in the back of my head I had the thought that the earring would play a more important role, but finding out it had been Hemalurgy all this time?

Elend and Marsh’s final showdown

Kandra Homeland

And Preservation having exactly 1/16th of everyone who went out into the mists become sick to have them Snap? Amazing! The 16 percent thing was really strange and to figure it out almost simultaneously with Elend. And TenSoon’s story was also amazing, with the Second Generation eventually taking control over the Firsts because of their own greed and selfishness. Although, now that I think about it, they may have been justified. If they truly thought that the end was not coming then I suppose it makes sense. They would be fools, but fools that saved their lives in the name of what was right. And the entire reveal of the kandra protecting and collecting all the atium to keep it from Ruin. I am amazed by the Lord Ruler’s skill of hiding this all from Ruin. It must have requried so much planning and all that without saying a word and only being able to write on metal sheets? The Lord Ruler was definitely evil but, as it turns out, trying to do the right thing.

A kandra

Spook

Spook’s story was also splendid. I was very confused about how he got the ability to burn pewter and I somehow didn’t think of improvised Hemalurgy by impalement. His entire arc and him becoming a savant just makes us discover more about Allomancy. It is weird how it is described that Hemalurgy requires a very specific placement but this one just so happened to be correct. But maybe it is not as precise as it is said, because Vin also has an earring and there was no way to interfere with that placement much at all. Anyway Spook is a very cool character, his thoughts about being useless and wanting to be seen resonated a bit with me. The Survivor of the Flames, also becoming a Mistborn at the end of the book is kind of badass.

Spook

Sazed

Sazed struggles with faith for the entirity of the book. He even has a portfolio to go through each and every religion he has studied to discover whether any of them don’t contradict themselves. Are any of the religions true? Eventually, after being brought to the kandra Homeland by TenSoon he discovers more about the Terris religion, his people’s own religion. He chooses to believe, not because it is logical, but because he has to. And then, when Elend is killed by Marsh in battle, and Vin used all of Preservation’s power to destroy Ruin and herself, Sazed is the Hero of Ages. Not Vin, but Sazed. He absorbs the powers of Preservation and Ruin and rebuilds the world using all the religions he has learnt about. Each one of them worshipped some part of the world. Some biological life, others the stars, some the flowers and many of them Gods, which Sazed now was. Sazed became God, able to shape reality and destiny to his will. I am still incredibly awe-struck by all the foreshadowing in all the books for not only this, but everything else.

Sazed absorbing Ruin and Preservation

Wrapping uo

This is, again, just a small part of the series, I even left out the entirety of Fadrex City and even the storage caches somewhat. I am excited to read Era 2 and I am also excited to see what the Mistborn TTRPG is about after I’m done with Era 2. I absolutely love this series and I am so happy that I finally decided to read it, although I don’t know if little me would have fared well against these beasts of books. Who knows? At least I’ve read them now and I couldn’t be more glad about it!