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Does Hoid use his Feruchemical abilities with the atium to see the future?
Ah ah ah, I haven't confirmed that Hoid had Feruchemical abilities.
You haven't?
*grinning slyly* No, but most people think he has Allomancy.
Can a person who dies but somehow hasn't passed Beyond the Three Realms (a la Kelsier) serve in place of a spren for Radiant purposes?
This is theoretically possible, but it would require an unusual sequence of events.
We know that the Stormfather is a Cognitive Shadow and is also acting as a spren for Dalinar but is he able to do that because the "unusual sequence of events" took place or is there something else going on specific to the nature of the Stormfather?
RAFO. :)
If Kelsier became a "spren" for a Radiant, would he grant Surgebinding or Allomancy?
RAFO.
Do you have a plan for the entire concept of the cosmere?
Yes I do.
Do you have an Allomancy dude fighting a Surgebinding dude?
Oh yeah it's going to be cool. It's going to be super awesome. The Allomantic space battles are really great. It's going to be like 15 years, sorry. But they are really cool.
OreSeur's Origins as a Character
Vin and OreSeur are quite well-established by this point. Actually, OreSeur and his character–the OreSeur we deal with in this book, with the conflicts and personality he uses–are one of the items I brought over from Mistborn Prime. (If you'll remember, that's the first stab I made at writing a Mistborn book years back. It was unpublished.) The kandra sidekick was one of the very few things that actually worked in that book. (Too well, actually. People liked him much more than they liked the actual hero of the story, who wasn't a character that appears in any of the current Mistborn novels.) If you ever want to read Mistborn Prime, email me and ask. I'll send you an electronic copy.
(I've talked about that book in previous annotations. While the book débuted an early version of Allomancy and a couple of world elements–such as the mists coming at night–very little of the book made the jump to the new, professional version of Mistborn. I pretty much just stole the concept for the magic and a few select world items and used them as a starting point for this series. In that way, this trilogy is a kind of sequel to the other Mistborn book, though the plots, world, and characters are very different.)
In Allomancy, bad alloys can be detrimental to you, can make you sick and stuff like that. Does it also apply in Feruchemy or generally impurities, do they apply?
Not as strongly.
How would they apply? Is it more like a smaller charge or?
It would just take less of a charge. It wouldn't make you sick.
When you are burning a Compounded metal are you getting the metal’s effect and the stored power? Can you explain, I’m unclear on the Compounding.
Compounding is a way to hack the magic system so you can get a Feruchemical attribute out of-- basically powering Feruchemy with Allomancy. If that makes sense.
So you’re not actually burning the metalmind?
Kind of? There’s a big explanation on Reddit, if you send me an email I can link you to it, that steps you through exactly, easier than explaining it here
So Power of Creation. Is the Power of Creation this thing of power that powers Allomancy and powers the Aons, or is the Power of Creation just what each shard has?
I would say "each shard has."
Can you use Feruchemy and Hemalurgy together like you can use Allomancy and Feruchemy to Compound?
*asks for clarification* There are some tricks you can play. I wouldn't call them Compounding, but there are tricks.
The Hemalurgy table, you wrote down "atium steals any power, lerasium is all abilities, nicrosil is Investiture"; what's the difference between those three?
Hemalurgic atium, lerasium, and nicrosil. What's powers, abilities, and Investiture?
People are Invested in ways that do not give them active powers. So for instance, everyone on Nalthis is Invested. Everyone in the cosmere is, really. You want to steal their Investiture, but they don't have a power. You're still ripping off a piece of their soul. So there is a distinction between the actual Investiture that's in a human being and a specific power that they have.
So that distinction is pretty easy. You can also, with Hemalurgy, steal specific things. You can steal just general Investiture. You can steal, if you want--this is where the kandra Blessings come from. You can instead steal specific things that are not like stealing Allomancy. Stealing, for instance, someone's mental acuity.
So abilities is like the half that's all the strength, speed, all that kind of stuff? Those are abilities, versus the Metallic Arts are all powers?
Yes.
Then Investiture, is that offworld magics?
No, no, it's the raw power.
Nicrosil is their soul?
Yes. A piece of their soul, essentially.
So how would you go about stealing an offworld power?
It's going to depend. A Breath, you would steal with nicrosil. It's general Investiture, is what you would probably going call that. You could forcibly remove someone's Breath from them. The ability to be a Sand Master you would steal with the power ability.
Chapter Thirty-Seven - Part Three
The following is a journal entry I wrote regarding this chapter three years ago. It's kind of fun that I finished it almost three years to the day from when I'm posting the annotation.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Finished 5-22-04
Okay, so Vin's running around in her skivvies again. There are a couple of legitimate reasons for this. First off, I figured that if I had an Allomancer captured, the first thing I would do would be to strip them completely. A little bit of metal can go a long way, and you don't want to miss any. Now, this isn't as big a deal for the Inquisitors, who can use Allomancy themselves to see sources of metal a person might be hiding on their body. However, I still think it would be standard procedure to take away the prisoner's clothing. I toyed–briefly–with having Vin be naked in this chapter. I decided I just didn't want to deal with that. Having an adult man get stripped and thrown in a cell is a bit different from doing the same thing to a young girl, I think.
So, this chapter is Vin's character climax. Here's where she finally realizes that part of trusting people is being trustworthy yourself–or, more importantly, part of not being abandoned is not abandoning your friends. Her choosing to stay with Sazed, followed by Elend's appearance, are very important events for Vin. Her decision is a fulfillment of her story-long character arc, which has transformed her form a jumpy, frightened, untrusting person into one that would stay behind with a friend she loves, even though she knows that she might be killed. Her reward, then, for this bravery is Elend's return–and the realization that there are people out there who love her enough to risk their lives for her. Her statement "You came back" to Elend is perhaps the most important line Vin gets to say in the book.
Her decision to go and fight the Lord Ruler is secondary to these things, I think–which is probably why this decision doesn't seem quite as well-founded as her decision to stay with Sazed. Still, the story has been pushing for a face-off between her and the Lord Ruler ever since Kelsier died, so I think that it works narratively.
I really want to get that final chapter written, but I have writing group in an hour, and I still haven't read one of the submissions. It looks like Vin & co. are going to have to wait until Monday to have their final climax. I don't expect it to be a long chapter–which is good, since I REALLY need to get to work on the Elantris rewrite. . . .
Vin Attacks Anyway
Vin without Allomancy is still quite a formidable threat. I established this back in book one, and thought I'd reinforce it here. She's scrappy, quick, and very skilled. Even a group of prepared guards was surprised by her, and she fought quite exquisitely, considering how outmatched she was.
The other great thing about Vin is her resourcefulness. A childhood on the streets with Reen taught her to use everything she has, and to improvise what she doesn't have. Give her a cot and some gruel, and she'll come out of it with a weapon, a means of escaping her manacles, and a darn good way to distract a bunch of guards.
So I could be wrong, but a Hemalurgic spike, when you use it and become a savant it does damage to your Spiritweb, right?
Yes Hemalurgy always hurts you.
So say you go to Roshar and you give somebody a Hemalurgic spike for some Allomantic power, don't care what, and you use it to become a savant. Does that qualify them as 'broken' enough to become a Radiant? As long as they are also following the Ideals to attract a spren.
So becoming a Radiant is a spectrum of terminologies. It... probably, but you would have to find a Radiant who would, or a spren who would be willing to touch that, okay? It's going to drive them back.
So would it also affect your probability of becoming an Elantrian?
Yeah it would affect your ability to become anything else, yes.
Okay, so would it be a positive effect, negative effect...? Because I was like, it gives you cracks in your Spiritweb.
It does give you cracks in your Spiritweb.
So it's easier for Investiture to get in. Does it make it easier for other Investitures to get in?
It would make it... yes. It's going to drive spren away. So what it's really going to make easier for, there, is spren and Investiture that doesn't care.
Okay, so Investiture doesn't care but spren do.
Investiture might care depending on if it's part of a Shard-- if it has intent and things like this.
So it might let Stormlight in easier than a Breath, type thing.
I'm saying it might let Odium in easier than Syl. Because Syl would care, and Odium would not care.
Okay cool.
Alright, so it could be a really bad thing, is what I'm trying to say to you.
Yeah that's cool. I just want to know more about gold too. Gold Allomancy too. Because Miles was doing some funky stuff.
Miles was doing some funky stuff.
How are you going to deal with the fact that Allomancy is genetic, and as it spreads to the population, the general power of it decreases in a given individual. What are you going to do in Eras 3 and 4?
That is what we call a RAFO. Read and Find Out. You can find in Era 2 one group's attempts at dealing with that. But they are approaching it in a very scary way.
Is it x-linked? Is it dominant?
This actually plays into the way the cosmere works. Every person in the cosmere has what I call a Spiritual DNA, which exists in... it goes back to Platonic forms, it's very weird. But it is not their actual genetic code, it is their Spiritual genetic code, which works a little differently.
Those dots [in Allomancy symbols] can move around. They are an alphabet, so you can use these as an alphabet to write things. And the placement of the dot will tell you where the vowel is that comes after it.
So, if you do tin and duralumin... tin is the "I." (It looked like an "I," so I assigned "I" to it. Plus, I thought it was cool. My name starts with an "I," and I wanted it). Duralumin is the letter for "S." And the ones that are not vowels, you can move the dot around for different things.
I think you can throw the dot outside of it, and it will make a different sound, and I can't remember. Like, it might go from "Sah" to "Say." And if you don't change it, then it just acts...
I think, on the Badali [rings], they're just transliterating it one-to-one.
So, when there's wordplay in The Stormlight Archive, we know they aren't speaking English, so are you to assume that that is a translation of the...
This is what Tolkein said, and I always rely upon this. You're reading the book in translation, and the person translating it is going to try to use the closest in feel, but to also make it translate to English. So even when they use idioms and things like that, sometimes they translate and the translator can drop them in. Sometimes they just don't translate, so the translator comes up with something that works in English... It gets you a lot of loopholes, like if you accidentally call something an ottoman and people are like, "But there's not an Ottoman Empire in this fantasy world!" But you're like, "Yeah, all words work that way." It's in translation. This is why when you read something like Allomancy, and they're like, "Well, it's got Latin roots, right?" Yeah... it's just the roots in their language would be something old Terris, and the easiest way to convey that feeling is to use something that's got-- you know. Stuff like that.
In the Mistborn books, there's no one who can do chromium Feruchemy. If there was someone who had both the Feruchemy and the Allomancy related to chromium, they could create infinite luck. So doesn't that mean they could just do whatever they wanted?
Well, we will deal with how exactly Fortune works in the cosmere at a later date. There's a reason I haven't shown somebody with it yet, because I'm saving that for later on. Let's just say that even the Terris people don't quite understand it, even during Era 2.
Title Page - Part Two
Okay, so here we see the words Final Empire for the first time. Continuing the discussion I had in the last annotation, one of the books that I wrote after Mistborn Prime was called The Final Empire. (I now call it The Final Empire Prime.) It was the story of a young boy (yes, boy) named Vin who lived in an oppressive imperial dictatorship that he was destined to overthrow. It was my attempt at writing a shorter book that still had epic scope.
This book turned out to be okay, but it had some fairly big problems problems. While people reacted rather well to the characters, the setting was a little weak for one of my books. Also, once again, I wasn't that enthusiastic about the way the plot turned out.
After that, I gave up on the short books. I proved no good at it. I decided to do The Way of Kings next, a massive war epic. It turned out to be 350,000+ words–I kind of see it as me reacting in frustration against the short books I'd forced myself to write. About this time, I sold Elantris, and Moshe (my editor) wanted to see what else I was working on. I sent him Kings. He liked it, and put it in the contract.
I, however, wasn't certain if Kings was the book I wanted to use as a follow up for Elantris. They were very different novels, and I was worried that those who liked Elantris would be confused by such a sharp turn in the direction of my career. So, I decided to write a different book to be my "second" novel.
I had always liked Allomancy as a magic system, and I liked several of the character concepts Final Empire. I also liked a lot of the ideas from both books, as well as some ideas I'd had for a great plot. I put three all of these things together, and conceived the book you are now reading.
Which Invested Art does Khriss find the most interesting to study? (or is it one we haven't seen yet)
I think Khriss is really fascinated by aspects of all of them, but lately she's been most into the weirdness of Allomancy, for instance things like how speed bubbles work and how weight manipulation works and how that interacts with mass, and the weird, weird, weird science of all of that that drives the arcanists mad.
With Allomancy is of Preservation, and you have Hemalurgy, which is of Ruin. Is Feruchemy a joint effort between the two? Or is it a third party?
Joint effort.
So each anti-investiture is like its world's investiture, but can't be effected by it. So aluminum can't be affected and destroys Allomancy, ralkalest can't be Soulstamped, Shardblades are blunted by that one thing. Is the black filled sphere that Galivar gives to Szeth the anti-investiture to Stormlight?
When I asked this, he became much more tight-lipped and said that was an interesting theory and that I would learn more in book three.
Chapter Forty-Seven
The Death of Bilg
You may not recognize a cameo appearance by Bilg in this chapter. He was the soldier who punched Demoux. Who is Bilg? Well, if you go read book one, you'll find a scene where Kelsier visits the caves where his army is training. He picks a soldier out of the crowd to champion him and has the man fight a duel with one of the army's dissident members. Kelsier helped his champion by using Allomancy to interfere with the fight.
The champion? Captain Demoux. The dissident troublemaker he fought? A guy named Bilg. (Perhaps you can see why Bilg would bear a grudge against Demoux.) In the original draft of book one, Bilg died in that fight. However, readers reacted harshly against Kelsier killing a man to make a point. So, I backed off and had Bilg live and become a follower of Kelsier.
I've always felt that he should have died, though. So, in this book, he makes trouble again, fights Demoux again, and this time finally gets what he deserves. The only problem is that Elend gets his name wrong here and calls him Brill instead. Oops. Since that makes it pretty much impossible to spot the cameo, I may get that changed in a reprint.
I caught that reference. [in reference to tinfoil hats blocking emotional allomancy]
I built aluminum to do all sorts of funky things to all the powers, and I actually hadn’t made the connection of tinfoil hats until after I’d built it in, and I was writing it in Alloy of Law, years after I built it in, saying “Wait a minute! I just put tinfoil hats in the book!” (laughter) So I actually built that without thinking that there would be a joke to that.
You mentioned previously that you regret making Vin the only woman in Kelsier's crew. Is that something you're planning to change in the Mistborn screenplay?
It is; I actually already did it. Both Dox and Ham are female in the screenplay. And actually, Ham in particular works really well as a woman, because one of the things that I wanted to do was play with Vin's conceptions of how a thieving crew works, because she worked in bad ones, and not understanding how a great team can work. So I have a great scene where she misinterprets everybody's job in the crew from glancing at them, making a quick judgement, and saying "Well this person's this, this person's this." And the only one she gets right is Spook. It works so well.
Like, in the book, I can take pages and pages to show you, "This is how this crew is different from ones you might have read and ones that Vin has been part of." And in this, the movie, you need to have scenes do a lot of heavy duty lifting, multiple things at the same time. So in this scene, Vin can do that, and then we understand her judgement of why she said all these things, and then Kelsier can be like, "No. That right there is our Thug," pointing at Dockson [Ham], who is now a shorter woman. And with the powers of Allomancy, doesn't matter. And it becomes kind of a big moment, both for the audience and for Vin to understand "things are different here."
I do have to warn you, there isn't a lot of time in the screenplay for the crew. If I'm gonna do this as a film... Which it's not set in stone; it's possible that I'll move to a show. But right now, what I'm planning is: film, television show for Well of Ascension, film. Which means that mostly in the first film, it is focused on Vin, Kelsier, Sazed, and Elend. That's gotta be the core of our film. With Shan as an antagonist. And that's the movie. And I can't spend as much time with each of the crew members, like I did. But what we can do is, we can then move into Well of Ascension as a show, and with that being a show really show the crew and the things they're doing. And kind of write a heist with the crew where the crew is trying to heist keeping the kingdom from collapsing. A thieving crew has been put in charge of a city; let's see if they can keep this empire going. And I think that will work really well in television show format. And that's where we can get into some the things with OreSeur and TenSoon and character arcs for some of the crew members, really get to know Ham and Breeze and everybody.
That's the big cost by doing it in a film. That's the thing you're gonna have to understand, as it becomes really Vin and Kelsier's story. And I think it's gonna work. I think it is great. But if it doesn't, we do have the option of just doing a television show. Which I know a lot of you would rather see; I just see Mistborn as a film. I've always seen it as a feature film. So I'm hoping I can make it work.
*Inaudible, presumably about inspiration for Allomancy.*
For Mistborn, more alchemy. I am fascinated by the fact that Isaac Newton believed in it. Just the transition period between superstition and science is a fascinating period.
I hope you noticed the difference between the way Kelsier got into the room and the way Vin did it. She walked up to the guards at the front and talked them away, rather than killing them. She just strolled through the guard chamber–the place where she killed her first time–instead of attacking. Why attack? She's powerful enough that she can just slip through and escape.
For Kelsier, the killing was always part of the victory. Vin's more goal-oriented, perhaps. In addition, she doesn't like to kill. So, her way is to just slip by the men. Then, in the room, she doesn't get close to the Inquisitors–she takes them down with tricks. On the streets, she would have had to use very little to gain much. She needed to be extremely clever with the small advantages she had. She used Allomancy in small ways to great advantage. Now that she's more powerful, I think her cleverness and resourcefulness will lead her to be far more amazing an Allomancer than Kelsier was.
Also, in another fun note, Ruin didn't know about the horseshoes trick Vin used until he saw her do it. During a thousand years of Allomancy, she was the first to figure out how to do that. Clever girl.
Unless you are using it to describe a method of divination, X-mancy probably does not mean what you think it means. -mancy, from the Greek manteia ("divination") cannot be used to denote the magical manipulation or evocation of something. The root you are looking for is -urgy, from Greek ergon ("work").
But fantasy books get a little leeway here because it's generally understood that English is being used as a proxy for an in-world language, so Greek etymology doesn't necessarily apply.
And Brandon Sanderson's admitted that he knows what mancy means, and calling his magic system in Mistborn allomancy was simply a useful tradeoff.
Yes, I talk about this in the annotations, I believe.
Language shifts. I believe this one has shifted far enough inside the target demographic (fantasy readers) that it would not confuse. In fact, I decided it would be MORE clear to use the 'wrong' term than the right one.
I subscribe to a school of writing philosophy which believes that clarity trumps most other concerns, so I chose to do it this way. (Though this was a specific choice for the Mistborn world, where I was attempting to create resonance as an Earth analogue, so used more familiar sounding names for people and terms. Compare to Elantris, where I instead preferred in-world names and terms which might be harder to say/pronounce but added worldbuilding flavor.)
Chapter Seventeen
The Mists Form
In writing this book, I had to nail down a few worldbuilding issues I'd been contemplating even before the first trilogy ended. What would happen to the mists, for instance, once Sazed took over and became Harmony?
The mists, obviously, are a big part of the series. It didn't make sense—either narratively or worldbuilding-wise—to lose them completely. However, they'd been created as an effect of Preservation trying to use his essence to fight against Ruin's destruction of the world. So . . . wouldn't they go away?
I decided that Sazed would still send them. They're part of the nature of the world now. To acknowledge what had happened, they wouldn't come every night any longer. But they would come. They were changed in that they are no longer simply the raw power of Preservation; they're now a part of Harmony—so they no longer pull away from Hemalurgy in the same way as they used to. They still have the odd effect of being able to power Allomancy. (And Feruchemy as well—if one knows how to do it.)
The mists are, in part, the raw power of creation. And when one is favored of Harmony, the mists have a greater effect than they might otherwise have. We'll see more of this later.
Mistborn, the broadsheet hints that there's a continent or whatever on the other side of the Mistborn planet. Would that also be connected to Allomancy and Feruchemy and all that?
Yes, it will be. The Southern Continent does have interactions with the three Metallic Arts, but they use them in very different ways.
Vin Kills Zane despite his Atium
The other thing I had to foreshadow, then make work in this chapter, was the way to kill someone who was burning atium. This is also something I stole from Mistborn Prime, and I'm afraid that it worked better there.
The thing is, I just haven't spent enough of the plot with Vin working on this problem. Killing an atium-burner was a major plotting conflict in Mistborn Prime, which was a much shorter book, without so much going on. In this book, we have many, many different plotlines and secrets interweaving. And so there wasn't a whole lot of time for Vin to worry about how to survive without atium.
According to the laws of Allomancy, this is very in-line with how atium works. Only someone burning atium can change the future–but they can change it accidentally by showing someone else what to do.
Does Lerasium have Feruchemical and Hemalurgical powers?
Yes. Brandon will probably be getting into these, and the other metals Hemalurgical and Feruchemical powers, in greater detail in the future Mistborn trilogies. He also will probably release full charts for these as he did with Allomancy.
Marsh? The book doesn't mention him after he fights with Elend.
Marsh is alive. I changed this from when I talked to [Peter]. I realized some things about his use of Allomancy that would allow him to survive. Actually, he is immortal. He can pull off the same Allomancy/Feruchemy trick that the Lord Ruler did. (And he knows it too, since he was there when Sazed explained how it was done in Book One.) He's actually the only living person who actually knows this trick for certain. (Though there's a chance that Spook, Ham and Breeze heard about it from Vin and the others.) So yes, if there were another series, Marsh would make an appearance.
I thought that trick required atium and involved burning the atium. With all the atium gone and Sazed not making any more, it would therefore not be possible even for a full mistborn/feruchemist. Am I wrong, is Sazed providing atium specifically for Marsh to allow a friend and valuable servant to survive, or what?
Marsh has the bag of atium that KanPaar sent to be sold, as well as several nuggets in his stomach. So, I guess 'immortal' is the wrong phrase. He's got the only remaining atium in the world and can keep himself around for a long, long while—but he WILL eventually run out. Unless Sazed does something.
You mention... No you didn't mention Arthur Clarke. The guy with the "Any sufficiently advanced technology is distinguishable from magic" ...In, at least, one of the Mistborn trilogies you are probably going to have to deal with the distinction between magic and technology. So can you talk a little about how you are going to address that?
So yeah, addressing the-- This is a really good question, thank you. So Clarke's Law says that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Right? And this is kind of a science fiction truism that we use in writing. It's a really cool concept when you think about it. But he asks "Well we're pushing the Mistborn trilogy more and more towards science fiction--"
For those who don't know, I pitched the Mistborn trilogy to my editor, long ago--this was 2003 when I pitched it to him-- I pitched it as a trilogy of trilogies. An epic fantasy trilogy that then after the epic fantasy trilogy we would jump hundreds of years and do an urban fantasy trilogy in a more modern setting, where all of the events of the epic fantasy trilogy became the foundation of religion and superstition and even culture to a modern society. What if our heritage were something like The Lord of the Rings? And then I was going to write a science fiction trilogy where... magic became the means by which space travel is possible. So there is, built-in to Allomancy, Feruchemy, and Hemalurgy, FTL-capability. *audience mutters* *nervously* It's not there yet don't worry. *laughter*
Somebody found the rabbit-hole.
That's all RAFO's. I'm not answering any of that.
So I did Alloy-era, by the way, as a stop-gap between the epic fantasy and the modern because I wanted something smaller-- The modern trilogy is going to be very thick books, and I wanted something to balance Stormlight while I was doing the first five Stormlight...
So he's asking how I'm going to deal with this whole collision... between science and magic. So there's a-- I don't know if corollary is the right term. Probably not, but there's a version of Clarke's Law which you inverse. And you say "Any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from science". In the cosmere the magic is science. What I would call-- say is science fantasy because we've added to the Laws of Thermodynamics. We have this other thing called Investiture, which is what powers all the magic. Which is the souls of the things they call gods, their substance. And you can change matter or energy into Investiture and back. And so we've got a third circle in the old Laws of Thermodynamics and so because of that it's science fantasy. I would still call this fantasy because science fiction is where they go "We're going to take the Laws of Thermodynamics and try to explain what we can do using them" I'm like "No, we're just going to add to them, right?" But yeah that's where we're going. There will be a collision of that but it's really going to be-- To them it's indistinguishable, once you get far enough along, that it really is science.
If you used Hemalurgy to steal Allomancy, Harmony gets some kind of insight into the person that was spiked? He can talk to them? And with enough spikes hear their thoughts?
Mmhmm. Yes. With enough spikes, take them over.
So if you use a spike to say, steal Breath, would Endowment?
I'll RAFO that for now. Good question though, I haven't been asked that yet.
If you stole Breath, would Harmony still keep the same effect?
That's why I'm going to give a RAFO.
Chapter Two
Allomantic fights are fun.
I'll admit it. I LIKE to write things that are fun. I'm an entertainer–and that is what my stories try to do. I think there's great value in that.
That said, I think this might be my least favorite fight in the book. You may remember that I said the same thing about the first battle in book one (that's the fight where Kelsier takes on the Hazekillers in Keep Venture.) Getting the mechanics of Allomancy down, showing things step by step, takes longer, and lacks a bit of finesse. I hope this fight was still enjoyable, but it was far too step-by-step to be really great, in my opinion.
The fights I really like are the ones where there is a beauty–a sense of grace and poetry–to the fight itself. The one at Keep Hasting later in this book is a much better example off that.
Is there a cosmere-specific term you use to describe, say, a Shard's power inside someone? For example, people on Scadrial had little bits of Preservation in them that made them sentient (and, with enough Preservation, Allomancy). This obviously doesn't make these people Slivers or Splinters, so I was just wondering if you had a word for it.
In my own terms, I refer to all of this as types of Investiture. The degree, and effects, can be very different--but those people are Invested. I term this innate Investiture, and it is similar to what happens with people on Nalthis. That is also innate.
Miles as a God
I had to be careful about the Miles "Are we not gods?" monologue, as I feel this is a theme that's come up a little too often in the Mistborn books. The Lord Ruler had it, Kelsier had it to an extent, and Zane flirted with it. We ran into it with Spook as well.
I like that it's a running theme—this would be a real concern, I feel. In our world, we talk about one race or gender being superior, but in the end there's really no scientific basis for it. Yes, people are different, but I find no solid argument to one group being better than another. That hasn't stopped a lot of people from trying to prove it.
Well, what if there were something like Allomancy? It's the only major magic system I've done that is genetic. And in this world, you have the only solid argument of "Well, one genetic line is obviously superior to another." That creates for some troubling things to think about, I should hope. It goes further than skaa and nobility, as talked about in the first trilogy.
If you were Miles—who, by genetics, was practically invincible and immortal—I think it would be very hard to not to start thinking of yourself in this way. So it keeps popping up as a theme. (Eventually I'll really dig into it, rather than flirting with it as I have in most of the books.)
Looking more closely at the [Steel Alphabet] font, it looks like we're missing some information. Note that the tin symbol for 'e' and 'i' are slightly different: the dot is in a different location. I suppose that the dots are diacritical marks, then.
Any other diacritical information we should know about the Steel Alphabet (or Alethi, for that matter), Peter?
Moving the dot to distinguish vowels is a modern innovation, within the last 100 years by ALLOY OF LAW. I suspect that dots may be gone entirely (except for the two changed vowels, and maybe "capital" letters) in many fonts by the time you get to the second trilogy. Numbers might get a moved dot too. The placement of the dots in the original symbology has to do with Allomancy, but they're largely superfluous in writing.
The Feruchemical symbols (which are in the RPG) are evolved from the same root (the ancient symbols you can see in MISTBORN 3), but I don't know about their use in modern writing. It could be something like the hiragana/katakana distinction. But that's just speculation right now.
Now, if Sazed's leaving her alone didn't hint at you that something was coming. . .well, you need to go back to foreshadowing school.
The image of Vin bursting out of the building as the rose window churned the mists, falling beneath her, was one of the first fight scene images I got for this book. When I came up with it, I knew that I absolutely had to find a way to have a fight at Keep Venture.
Originally, I was going to have Vin use her Allomancy more obviously in front of the crowds. Having her do it the way it ended up happening in the book was simply a matter of convenience–the plotting of the chapter had her end up in the back corridors rather than in front of any crowds.
Either way, this turned out to be a very powerful chapter, one in which I'm extremely pleased.
Can stormlight be used to fuel allomancy like the mist in the mistborn trilogy? Is stormlight therefore a manifestation of honour?
This is possible.
I was wondering if there is a unit of Investiture, like maybe something Khriss uses.
Yes, but I haven't canonized it yet. Good question. I will eventually canonize it, because I think that people will want it, but I probably won't do so 'til [Mistborn] Era 3, because I want the scientific way of talking about the cosmere to mirror how developed the cultures are, but some of the scholars are beyond where everyone else is. It can be measured. There is a unit.
Like, maybe grams of solid Investiture?
It will probably be an in-world unit of measurement. Right now, to talk about it online if you want, the unit is probably gonna be based around Breath, because a Breath is a distinct amount. Whereas in most of the settings, there's not a distinct amount. Like, how much Allomancy, things like that. How much can a gem hold. It really depends on how the gem is cut, and how long the gem has been out. So... the Breath is a really easy one, so it's become the unit. But there will probably be a fantasy term for it. I might just call it Breath. That's why I'm not canonized yet. But if you guys wanna talk about it in Breath terms, that's probably the easiest.
I was wondering with Emperor's Soul-- it's in the same world as Elantris.
Yes.
But it's a completely different magic system.
Yeah.
Do you ever see The Emperor's Soul, like, that magic system in further Elantris books?
Yeah, you will see more of that. Elantris-- So what Elantris is very-- is interesting-- is Sel, the planet that is, that each region has basically a way of accessing the magic, and they're all, in my mind, programming languages. And you use different things to program, and call functions basically. And some people etch into bone, some people draw in runes, some people make the soulstamps. You can do it through a tai chi-like thing in one of world-- in one of the lands. So it's like a-- region-based for reasons that cosmere magic experts I think have figured out by now.
Well it's like there were two deities, I think, Invested in that planet?
Yep... The reason is-- and we have announced it-- the reason it is is, so on Sel-- somebody killed the two deities there, right? And then stuffed their corpses, which are just huge magic reservoirs, just *inaudible*. So all their power stuffed up into what we call the Cognitive Realm, the realm of the mind, which is location dependent. So all the magic is getting filtered through that, it does weird things to it, it makes it region-locked. So yeah.
Is it the only world that has many different ways that magic is--
Well a lot of them have different ways. For instance, for-- on Scadrial we've got Feruchemy, and Allomancy, and things like that. So most worlds have different interpretations, and things like that. Sel's the only one you've seen where it's region dependent.
Are there any magic systems in the cosmere that aren't shard based?
This depends on definitions. The effects of Adonalsium permeate everything, and Adonalsium is also the source of the Shards. It is possible to find a magic that isn't DIRECTLY powered by a specific shard, however, though most of these would have been set up before the shattering and would be much smaller in scope than things like Allomancy and Surgebinding.
So here's my last question. If there ARE people on the other side of the world, did Vin kill them all by placing the sun on their side, or do they have they're own Ruin/Preservation battle going on over there as well? Do they also have allomancy feruchemy and hemalurgy?
No, they're not dead. Yes, Rashek was aware of them. In fact, he placed them there as a reserve. I knew he wanted a 'control' group of people in case his changes to genetics ended with the race being in serious trouble. All I'll say is that he found a way other than changing them genetically to help them survive in the world he created. And since they were created by Ruin and Preservation, they have the seeds of the Three Metallic Arts in them—though without anyone among them having burned Lerasium, Allomancers would have been very rare in their population and full Mistborn unheard of.
If I stab someone with a steel spike to steal their physical Allomancy, what determines which power I steal? Where the spike is stabbed into, my Intent, or some other factor?
Intent is at play once you get to the finer points of Hemalurgy, but that can get wonky, as evidenced by some certain events with Spook and even Vin.
So as I was rereading Mistborn, I realized something that I hadn't deemed important before. Assuming that Rashek doled out the original Allomancy beads to create the first Mistborn, who did he give them to? Obviously, he couldn't give them to his fellow packmen because then they would have the same compounding abilities as him. Additionally, it stands to reason that he would not have given the beads to any of Alendi's entourage because of his deep-seated hatred for all things Khlenni. All in all, I'm just confused about the actual origins of the noble houses.
I actually intended to dig into this in the video game--which happened several hundred years after the event, but which would talk about the origins of the houses and things like that. It's possible we'll still do this some day.
Did you end up doing a lot of writing for the game before it got cancelled?
Depending on how much there is, it seems like handing it to Crafty for them to make a RPG module could make sense.
No, I didn't--but I had a lot of ideas.
My current goal is to hand it over to Ben (who does a lot of the artwork for Stormlight Archive) and see if we can turn it into a graphic novel. (Note that we wouldn't start on this until White Sand is done, though, as I don't want to have TOO many projects in the works at once.)
Can Yumi's magic work on Splinters other then Torio's spirits and is nightmare painting an Invested Art along the lines of Allomancy or sand mastery?
We've covered the painters one. Let's just RAFO Yumi. You will find out more in the book.
Is this a prequel to the "modern" trilogy? How far into the future is that? (in-world)
There will be several "Wax and Wayne" books dealing with the next development; they're not so much "prequel" as they are a side venture into life between the first and second trilogies, but they will be used to provide some foreshadowing for the second trilogy. Incidentally, he also described the beginning of the second trilogy as "a Misting SWAT team trying to figure out how to take out a criminal Mistborn." He also said that the third trilogy will be much nearer "hard scifi" as their understanding of Allomancy and Feruchemistry enables them to develop FTL propulsion.
Part Three Wrap-up
As I promised, things pick up a lot in the next section. Still, despite its slowness, I like Part Three, as it's the section of the book that feels the most free for natural character growth. There's a free-spiritedness to this section of the book, where Vin is working with the crew and learning her place in things. She is forced to not use Allomancy for a while, which in turn forces her to spend more time with people. This lets us begin to establish Elend as a character.
Now, with the army's death and the things that will happen in the next few chapters, the book can't really be the same. Things are coming to a head, and the city is growing very tense.
Do any of the worldhoppers that we've met so far-- Do they all just use this sort of perpendicularity to travel?
Perpendicularity is the primary way to get between planets.
But are we going to get a conventional inter-planetary travel, like based on Allomancy maybe?
You have seen conventional inter-planetary travel in Arcanum Unbounded, in the story Sixth of the Dusk, which takes place many hundreds of years after most of the stories in the cosmere. So yes.
Ok so that's where it's--
Yeah there's actually space travel involved in that story but not from the main characters, they just reference them, but yes.
