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If all of the atium was burned at the end of era one to destroy ruin, how has Marsh survived into era 2?
Not all was burned, all that was in the well was, but there was a bag of atium left and some people had some other little bits of atium
By the way, Brandon originally wrote the prologue to The Alloy of Law soon after finishing The Alloy of Law and he meant it to be the prologue to Shadows of Self. Then he decided that The Alloy of Law needed a better prologue than its current chapter 1, which was originally the prologue.
Do you think writing Robert Jordan's books affected your writing style in any way?
It did. It affected me, you know, It definitely affected me. Robert Jordan was very good at some very important things. He was great with viewpoint, he was very good at foreshadowing and subtlety. In fact, I think he was way more subtle than I've been, and I think those are things I've learned by working on this project. And also, just being able to balance so many different characters and viewpoints. That's something I think I learned. Though you know, I consciously when I wrote Alloy of Law, which is next, I consciously said, you know, I think I'm going to use a different style. There are some people who love the Wheel of Time, there are some people who don't like the Wheel of Time, and I don't want to become, you know, my style to become the Wheel of Time style. It's my own style. The Way of Kings is certainly more like Wheel of Time, you know, but also more like all the classic epics and fantasy that I read. Alloy of Law is intentionally not like that. Alloy of Law is more of a fast-paced thriller plotting style than it is epic fantasy.
My question was about Hemalurgy. There was a disagreement on the last Shardcast. When spiking a Mistborn to charge a Hemalurgic spike, does it matter how the Mistborn is killed or is what power is stolen based only on the metal?
So you want to place the spike in a specific place.
In the donor. In the recipient, not the donor.
In the recipient. And you want to use the specific metal and so basically if you aren't precise about how you spike, you risk taking the wrong thing within the same family. Some of those, that's not as big a deal, but for some it is kind of a big deal. And so you want to be very precise, you'll get something, but if you're not placing the spike in the right place and going into the right place, then you risk it.
You risk stealing the wrong thing.
Yeah. Now if you're going off of somebody who's not a Mistborn, you can be a little more flexible, but you still have the danger that you're not going to end up stealing the power, you're going to steal something else. So, precision is advisable, how about that?
Yeah. Because the question was kind of specifically about, like, we know that atium spikes can kill-- can steal pretty much any power.
Yes. You want to be super precise with your atium spike.
So, part of the question was like, exactly, if you just killed a Mistborn, you stab a Mistborn in the heart with an atium spike, and you're not placing it immediately--
What do you end up with? You are rolling the dice, let's say. Not as big a roll of the dice as you might think, but you still are. You might not get what you want.
And then when you place the spike on the recipient, if you like tore that spike out again and put it in someone else, you're not going to be able to get more than one power out of it?
No. No, and if you place the spike in the wrong place, then you're going to end up with interference and things like this where the spike might just not work the way you want it to. Taking a spike and putting it in the wrong place in someone is not going to make them have a different power, in other words.
What I spent 2014 doing
January–March 2014: Firefight
Though I had hoped to have Firefight (The Reckoners 2) done long before January, the touring last year made that impossible. It snuck over into 2014, which is why you’re getting the book in January 2015 instead of the originally scheduled fall of this year. In March, I also did the Words of Radiance tour, which really cut into my writing time.
April 2014: Legion: Skin Deep
In April, once all the chaos was done, I took the time to finish up Legion: Skin Deep (sequel to Legion from a few years back), which I’d been working on during plane flights the year before. If you haven’t checked these two novellas out, you might want to consider it! They’re very fun, though the second book is not yet out in the UK and associated territories such as Australia and New Zealand. (Note that in those territories, Legion 1 and The Emperor’s Soul were released together in a very handsome paperback.)
We will eventually have regular hardcover copies of Legion 2 available. That will probably come sometime in the first half of next year. Our contract with Subterranean Press, who produced the very attractive limited edition hardcovers of Legion 2, says that we’ll wait until their edition sells out before we release a competing one.
May 2014: The Aztlanian (Rithmatist 2)
Next, I dove into research for a sequel to The Rithmatist. This is going to be a tough book to write, as it takes place in a fantastical version of Central and South America, and deals with things from Aztec (Mexica) mythology. (In The Rithmatist, a lot of the geography is shifted around in bizarre ways.)
Dealing with another group’s culture in this way is rife with opportunities for stuffing my foot in my mouth, and so I wanted to be very careful and respectful. This meant spending time devoted exclusively to doing extensive research. I didn’t actually get any writing on the book done, though I read some very excellent history books.
(As an aside, if anyone out there is an expert in the Aztec/Mexica culture—particularly if you yourself are a Native American—I’d love to have your help on this book.)
At the end of the month, I decided I needed to do way more research than a month afforded, so I put the book off for now. I still intend to write it, but I need more time to do it right.
June 2014: Alcatraz
Having spent a month with no writing, I wanted to jump into something fun and quick to refresh me before moving on to my next book. So, I dug out my outline for the Alcatraz series and at long last did a rough draft of the fifth book. These are fast, fast books to write—as I improvise them—but they are very slow to edit.
I finished the book, and am pleased with it, but I have no firm date yet for when I’ll be publishing it. Tor is rereleasing the series starting next year with new covers and extensive interior art. I believe these launch starting about a year from now. (If you want them before then, your best bet for getting them is the UK omnibus of the first four.)
I’ll want to release the fifth one once the series has been rereleased, so maybe summer 2016. If you’ve never read these, they are very different from my other work. They’re bizarre and sarcastic comedies that are self-referential and offer commentary on fantasy as a genre along the way. Those who love them absolutely love them. Those who don’t tend to find them insulting. That dichotomy alone is part of what endears them to me.
July–December 2014: Mistborn
The last half of the year was dedicated to Shadows of Self, the new Mistborn novel. And I have a confession to make.
I also wrote the sequel.
Now, before you start wagging your finger at me for being a robot, there was a really good reason I did what I did. You see, I was having real trouble getting back into Shadows of Self. I had written the first third of it in 2012 between revisions of A Memory of Light. (I was feeling Wheel of Time overload.) However, it can be very hard for me to get back into a book or series after a long time away from it. (This is another issue with the Rithmatist sequel.)
So, jumping into Shadows of Self was slow going, and I found it much easier to go write the sequel to refresh myself on the world and characters. That done, I was able to move back to Shadows of Self and finish it up.
So a week or two back, I turned in two new Wax and Wayne Mistborn novels. They’re titled Shadows of Self and Bands of Mourning, and Tor decided to publish them in quick succession: the first in October 2015, the second in January 2016. So, if you have read the original trilogy but haven’t tried The Alloy of Law yet, you might want to give it a look! From the beginning, I’ve planned Mistborn to be a continuum series, showing off Allomancy in different time periods. I think you’ll find the Wax and Wayne books to be fun, quick reads—and they introduce some very, very big things coming in the Mistborn world.
There will be one more Wax and Wayne (early 1900s-era) Mistborn book. Back after I finished The Alloy of Law, I sat down and plotted out a trilogy with the same characters. The Alloy of Law was more of a happy, improvised accident. The follow-up trilogy is meant to be more intentional. So in the end, we’ll have four total. (The final one is tentatively called The Lost Metal.) From there, I might jump to the second “big” trilogy, which is 1980s tech. Or I might dally a little more in something 1940s-era instead. We’ll see.
Amusingly, doing these two Mistborn books together totaled only about half as much writing as a Stormlight book. Perhaps you can see why it takes even me quite a long time to finish Stormlight novels. (And it’s why you might want to lay off Pat Rothfuss a little. I believe The Wise Man’s Fear was even longer than Words of Radiance.)
Tor did their announcement about these books earlier today. You may now commence wisecracks about me secretly writing extra novels when nobody is looking.
Ruin in the Cache
So, you'll notice that Ruin appears to Vin here in the form of Reen. One might wonder why he even needed her to investigate if he could visit the cache himself.
This reveals the main problem Ruin was dealing with in this instance. The Lord Ruler was very clever in how he placed and organized these caches. He planned them in locations where there was so much metal in the ground that it would prevent Ruin from discovering them. And, more importantly, he trained his obligators—Yomen included—not to speak of what was down below or reveal the locations of the caches.
Ruin didn't know there was a cache here, not until Vin found the previous plate. Even once he knew where the cache was, he couldn't see much when he visited it. He couldn't know if there was atium there, for the entire area—particularly because of the metal cans Vin mentions—glowed so brightly that Ruin had no idea what he was seeing.
He needed a pawn to visit, one through whose eyes he could see. One who could discover where the atium was. Ruin drew the same conclusion Vin did here—that if there had been atium, Yomen would have moved it. But where? Ruin still needed her to find it for him. Either that or bring in an Inquisitor, something he eventually decided to do.
Simply destroying the pits probably wouldn't destabilize the economy to the point that some of those here assume. The thing is, atium isn't the foundation of monetary value in the Final Empire–not like gold was in America for a time. It's simply a prime source of income and power for the Lord Ruler. Losing it will be a blow, but not enough to completely overthrow the empire. After all, the Lord Ruler still has his atium cache–and so, as the metal becomes more rare and valuable, he'd become more wealthy through atium inflation.
Chapter Eighty-One - Part Three
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.
When is Emperor's Soul set chronologically in relation to Elantris? Because if its around the same time Teod and Arelon might not have to stand alone against the Fjordell Empire.
My other question is also a timeline one. (There are a lot of those tonight haha) I heard you had to move The Way of Kings a little bit due to some plot constraints. So does Warbreaker still fall around the same time as The Alloy of Law or has that shifted as well?
Thanks for the kind words! Emperor's Soul is after Elantris, but not too long after. It is before Mistborn.
Second question is that I've moved things so that The Way of Kings is around the same time as The Alloy of Law, forced by some behind-the-scenes events. Warbreaker now happens before The Alloy of Law.
If you have a Hemalurgic spike made of atium, that grants atium Allomancy, could you use the spike itself as a source of atium to burn?
Briefly.
Also speaking of continutiy...
Uh oh.
This is a very very minor spoiler. It's just a statement that was made in Alloy of Law, that Smokers could...
Oh yeah, that was just a typo
Is that going to change things?
Wait, go ahead and say it.
Can Copperclouds shield others' emotions?
Oh okay. Did we put that in Alloy of Law in the Ars Arcanum? Is that where you read it?
I forget. I don't remember where it is.
I believe it’s in the Ars Arcanum, which in Alloy of Law was put together by Peter. And that’s mostly a mistake, though the thing is the Role Playing Game came to me and said “Is it feasible that this could happen?” And I said “It’s perhaps feasible, but only a very rare individual could make this work if they knew exactly what they were doing.” And so I said “Yeah, go ahead, but make it a power that someone really has to know what they’re doing to make it work.” And so they put it in, and so Peter assumed that it was canon, that anyone can do it, but that’s not what I intended.
So would it be easier to say that somebody discovered they could do it and now they are training copperclouds to do it?
I would say that it is viable that someone could figure it out, but it would be a very difficult thing to train, and it is not a common Coppercloud—A common Coppercloud isn’t going to be able to be doing it, and almost no Mistborn will ever be capable of doing it, they just don’t focus on that metal enough to learn it. Of course, there aren’t Mistborn around anymore. So it is a possible power, it is plausible, but it is not the standard. Perhaps I will allow it to become the standard eventually, but it’s not right now. It would be much easier to wear a tinfoil hat. (laughter) Aluminum, aluminum. Which does work.
What led you to want to write a fourth Wax & Wayne book?
Right, when I wrote Alloy of Law as an experiment, then I said, "Oh, I really like this series, this turned out really well. I will now plot a trilogy with these characters." So, Alloy is the outlier, where I view Shadows, Bands, and Lost Metal as a trilogy. And this is, like, the prelude to the trilogy. And I do think that because... this was an experiment, I really think it was a good experiment. I'm better when I have more of a framework, so I think these two [Shadows and Bands] turned out stronger than this one [Alloy], because when I have a framework, but... at the same time, you need to always be trying, experimenting, new things as a writer.
Right, so Brandon's new novel is soon to be released, and it's obviously another Mistborn novel—it's a standalone. And we wanted to know, what can we expect?
That's Alloy of Law. Alloy of Law takes place several hundred years following the events of Hero of Ages. This was always the plan with the Mistborn series; I pitched it to my editor as a sequence of series set in the same world with an evolution of technology, which is not something I'd seen done very much in fantasy books—letting the technology process and seeing how magic interacts with it. Alloy of Law is the story of a man named Waxillium who has spent the last twenty years living out in the Roughs being a lawman. And his uncle dies, and we find out that Waxillium is actually the heir to his house. And back in the city of Elendel, they've got this sort of half lordship, half elected body that leads the government, and he has inherited a seat in this body and responsibility for thousands of people who work in his house. And so he has to leave the life of a lawman and come back to the city—which is patterned after 1910 New York—and live among, you know, the elite of the city. And yet he's kind of an unpolished sort of guy, having been out in the Roughs all this time. And it's his story, trying to make sense of this world. It's also a mystery; it's a very fast-paced sort of mystery, kind of... Imagine it this way, as I have been describing it lately. Imagine the Sherlock Holmes story. Now replace Sherlock Holmes with Clint Eastwood and add magic. And that's what you've got.
This room in the palace is another reason why I had to make this book about much more than just stealing atium. Kelsier is half-convinced that the Lord Ruler keeps his atium stash in this room, rather than in the treasury. Either way, it wouldn't be TOO difficult for a Mistborn like Kelsier to break into a room like this–or even the treasury–and be off with the atium. (At least, that's what he thinks. Right up until he gets stopped in this chapter, anyway.)
Either way, Kelsier wouldn't feel that he needs a crew in order to break into a room and steal some metal. He does that just fine to Keep Venture earlier in the book. By making Mistborn so relatively powerful, I needed a task for Kelsier's group that went far beyond a simple heist. Only something like raising an army and overthrowing an empire would present them with a challenge.
Shadows of Self - What an awesome story, and what a gut-punch of an ending! Was that planned when you wrote Alloy of Law?
Once I finished Alloy, I wrote the scene with Bloody Tan and Wax, intending it for Book 2. That was when I built this plot.
We eventually moved the scene to the start of book one, and I revised with the new perspective on Lessie.
So it was there by the time Alloy came out, but was not part of the first draft. Advice from [Dan Wells] caused it.
You have my sincere apologies
This question concerns Mistborn Era 2. Aluminum at this time is supremely rare and quite expensive, and Wax is seen lamenting his profound lack of aluminum guns and bullets fairly often. However, couldn't he fashion a "Poor Man's Aluminum" of sorts by coating his guns (and potentially bullets) in a thin veneer of iron, then Feruchemically charging it? You've noted that metalminds can still be pushed, but much less than un-Invested metal. This could help him, in the absence of aluminum. So, is there a reason he has not done that?
The layer you would get by just that little coat would be so small that it'd have very little effect. Now, there's a pretty good argument for putting it into bullets. The problem there is: are the alloys that make good bullets going to work very well? Now, granted, aluminum doesn’t make for great bullets either. But any aluminum alloy kind of gets the property of aluminum. Where any iron alloy does not necessarily get the property of being able to allomantically or feruchemically interact with it in the right way. Can you get there? It's an excellent question that I perhaps should explore. I like this idea. But it's harder than you make it out to be. It is a good idea, though; it's a pretty good idea.
Killing off the army like this was planned from the beginning. I knew I needed some kind of big wrench in the plans of the crew, and figured this would make a pretty good one. Plus, it felt natural, since it was a problem with Kelsier's own growing reputation. The very thing he's been working so hard to foster eventually turned against him.
When alpha readers read this chapter, they didn't see the loss of the army as much of a setback. That was one of the first things that made me realize the big flaw in the early drafts. I'd talked a lot in the crew about stealing the atium, but I'd spent all the time with them actually doing things on recruiting the army. So, the readers were still focused on the job being the atium heist, rather than the capture of the city. In that context, losing the army isn't all that bad.
So, I like how the rewrite focuses much more on the army. It makes the events of this chapter all the more poignant. Yeden, the one that was employing the crew, is dead. That should mean the end of everything.
At the end of Alloy of Law, when...
Spoiler! Talk circumloqutically, talk around it.
When that person said that thing at the end of the book, will that lead to future ideas of books?
Things in the Alloy of Law are foreshadowing things that will happen in the modern day Mistborn trilogy.
Before Ruin and Preservation showed up on Scadrial, was aluminum already antimagical? Also, is [The Alloy of Law] between Stormlight 5&6?
Yes, [The Alloy of Law] is after Stormlight 5. Specific timing will depend on how long I make the 5/6 gap once I get there.
Is Spook still around as of Alloy of Law?
As of Alloy of Law-- Yeah I'm gonna have to RAFO you on that.
I was also wondering if... I just finished reading the Ars Arcanum in the back of Bands of Mourning and I heard it mention that god metals could be alloyed to give different abilities or traits.
Yes.
Could you give an example of one?
So, you could alloy lerasium with certain metals of the sixteen in the table and get, if you had just enough lerasium, it would make them a misting of those powers.
As we get ready for the release of The Alloy of Law, I find myself wondering what the teenage me would think of what I’m doing in this book. You see, I became a fantasy addict when I was about fourteen, and one of my mantras quickly became, “If it has guns, it’s not good fantasy.”
Now here I am, adding guns to my most successful fantasy series.
Despite the ways I’ve changed over the years, despite my belief that fantasy should be (and is becoming) something more than the standard “guy living in idealized chivalrous England leaves his farm and saves the world,” a voice inside of me is screaming that nobody will buy this book. Because it has guns.
I don’t believe that voice, but I think it says something interesting about me and others like me. Perhaps we fantasy readers sometimes mix up correlation and causation in our fantasy novels. In fact, I’m more and more convinced that taste for a specific genre or medium is often built on shaky ground.
An example may help. I have a friend who once claimed he loved anime.
Over the years, he consistently found anime shows superior to what he found on television. But as he started to find more and more anime, he told me that he discovered something. He liked the anime he’d seen at first because these were the shows that were successful and well made, the ones with the quality or broad appeal to make the jump across cultures. He found that he didn’t like all anime—he only liked good anime. Sure, the medium had something important to do with it—but his enjoyment came more from the quality of his sample than the entire medium.
Likewise, I’ve come to find that what I enjoy is a good story. Genre can enhance this—I’m probably going to like a good fantasy more than a good thriller or romance because worldbuilding and magic appeals to me. In the end, however, it isn’t the lack of guns (as my young self assumed) that draws me to fantasy stories. It’s the care for setting, pacing, and character development.
This is actually a correlation/causation fallacy, and I wonder if I’m the only one to have made it. Many of the books in the fantasy section we love (perhaps because of the setting attention or the types of writers attracted to fantasy and SF) have dragons. Do we therefore make the assumption that we only like books with dragons? These two things (the dragons and our enjoyment) are parallel to, but not completely responsible for one another.
On the other hand, maybe I just think about this kind of thing too much.
Either way, I present to you The Alloy of Law. A look at the Mistborn world several hundred years after the events of the original trilogy, where the industrial revolution has finally hit and knowledge of gunpowder is no longer suppressed. That means guns. Lots of guns. And magic too.
The young me might have been horrified, but the thirtysomething me finds the mix to be exciting, particularly in a world where the magic is directly related to metal
In this unpublished book, we call it Mistborn Prime now. It's basically the Mistborn magic system, fully fledged. A lot of the Mistborn worldbuilding. But, what happens is, there's this assassin guy who's, like, dark and grimdark and super darky darky-grimdarky. And he gets assigned to go to this town and find out what's up; they've got atium there, and they're not supposed to. And he's like, "Mm, where are they getting this? I've gotta go..." And his father's like, "Go find everyone and kill them and get the atium." And he goes there and he falls in with a crowd of nice people who treat him well and he doesn't know what to do with that. And has a character arc to where he goes back and defeats his father.
In the prologue in The Alloy of Law, it talks about how the guy actually spikes people to the wall. Is there going to be Hemalurgy involved?
That's a RAFO. Hey, RAFOs! I will say, in Alloy of Law time, Hemalurgy is not well-known and that's not been spread around, and Feruchemy as an art moved like Allomancy did in that you can have just one of the powers. And we decided... Chemings? What did we decide, Peter? Oh, Ferrings. We decided Ferirngs. We couldn't decide between the two of those. It's in the book somewhere. But anyway, you can have one Allomantic and one Feruchemical. But not a lot of Mistborn and not a lot of full Feruchemists anymore.
Do you explain how the Feruchemists came back, because at the end there were a lot of eunuchs and...
Yeah, well, that's one of the reasons why Feruchemy has been split because it's very diluted now. The Terris people did survive because they made it. And so, the genetic code is there.
And so, every once in a while, hereditarily, the gene will come up.
Yeah. But that's why there aren't very many full-blooded Feruchemists anymore. A thousand years of the Lord Ruler trying to breed it out of the population followed by a cataclysm that destroyed most of the population of the world did them in, yeah.
So how do the exact mechanics of Feruchemy in relation to Compounding work?
This confusion is primarily around how [the Lord Ruler] gets his near infinite age.
Okay. So first off, I understand the concept of how they work. Feruchemy is net zero, Allomancy is net positive, combine them and you end with a net positive Feruchemy ability.
So how Feruchemy normally works... you take say weight, store half your normal weight and then you can access it whenever you want. So you (originally X weight) are taking A weight, storing it, and then you are at (X-A) weight, with access to A. So we have a metalmind that store magnitude with the efficiency of how its received based on how quickly or slowly it is drawn upon.
All the metalminds except atium seem to act this way. Atium seems to work as storing magnitude/time rather than just magnitude. The way I understand it is that say a 30 year old person becomes 50 years old for 1 day, this would give access to 20 years difference for a 1 day period.
The Lord Ruler then exploits this by gaining access to say 20 years difference over 10 days (magnification by Compounding) which he then slowly feeds into himself to lower his age.
Why this difference? I'm assuming its to maintain a neutral "body age" because with just magnitude a person could permanently make themselves younger by Compounding.
With just magnitude of "20 years of youth" being stored, if the Lord Ruler magnified it, he could turn it into "200 years of youth" and then he would never need the constant stream off youth (and wouldn't have died without the bracelets)
Hope this makes sense.
All right, so there are a few things you have to understand about cosmere magics to grok all of this.
First, is that magics can be hacked together. You'll see more of this in the future of the cosmere, but an early one is the hack here--where you're essentially powering Feruchemy with Allomancy. (A little more complex than that, but it seems like you get the idea.)
The piece you're missing is the nature of a person's Spiritual aspect. This is similar to a Platonic idea--the idea that there's a perfect version of everyone somewhere. It's a mix of their connections to places, people, and times with raw Investiture. The soul, you might say.
(Note that over time, a person's perception of themselves shapes their Cognitive aspect as well, and the Cognitive aspect can interfere with the Spiritual aspect trying to make the Physical aspect repair itself.) Healing in the cosmere often works by aligning your Physical self with your Spiritual self--making the Physical regrow. More powerful forms of Investiture can repair the soul as well.
However, your age is part of your Connection to places, people, and times. Your soul "knows" things, like where you were born, what Investiture you are aligned with, and--yes--how old you are. When you're healing yourself, you're restoring yourself to a perfect state--when you're done, everything is good. When you're changing your age, however, you are transforming yourself to something unnatural. Against what your soul understands to be true.
So the Spiritual aspect will push for a restoration to the way you should be. With this Compounding hack, you're not changing connection; it's a purely Physical Realm change.
This dichotomy cannot remain for long. And the greater the disparity, the more pressure the spirit will exert. Ten or twenty years won't matter much. A thousand will matter a lot. So the only way to use Compounding to change your age is to store up all this extra youth in a metalmind, then be constantly tapping it to counteract the soul's attempt to restore you to how you should be.
Yes, all of this means there are FAR more efficient means of counteracting aging than the one used by the Lord Ruler. It's a hack, and not meant to be terribly efficient. Eventually, he wouldn't have been able to maintain himself this way at all. Changing Connection (or even involving ones Cognitive Aspect a little more) would have been far more efficient, though actively more difficult.
Though this is the point where I ping [Peter Ahlstrom] and get him to double-check all this. Once in a while, my fingers still type the wrong term in places. (See silvereye vs tineye.)
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Elend and Straff Spar in Straff's Tent
As Elend suspects, Straff is lying through his teeth about the treaty with Cett. Straff would be too frustrated by making an alliance with someone he feels that he should be able to conquer, particularly after such a short time at siege. He's not fond of Eastern noblemen, a trait common in those from Luthadel, and he's annoyed that Cett forced him into the siege in the first place.
He has contacted Cett to feel out the other man's position, of course–which is how he knows that Cett isn't interested in the city, only in the atium. Or, at least, that's what Cett claims. Either way, Straff isn't about to split the atium cache–if he were to find it–with someone else. Particularly not a man who could prove to be such a strong rival.
Elend threatening Straff here is what I see as Elend's first big character turning point. It's brash, but it's also kingly. He stares down a much stronger foe through sheer force of will, though he does add in a very powerful threat.
How did Marsh survive for so three hundred years and *inaudible*?
Compounding atium. He got a little pouch that one of the kandra gets sent out with if you watch, and then Marsh shows up and he has the pouch.
<When is that>?
Go look for the little pouch of atium.
The metals used in Allomancy are they naturally occurring on Roshar?
They do.
And all the alloys as well?
Yes, the magics would...oh, all the alloys in Roshar naturally occurring… The magic of Mistborn is related to the actual metals' structure being the key. So, you can use metals from other worlds, there's no actual power in the metal. The metal is like a password.
Can I ask what defines a "trilogy's worth of arcs"? I always thought that roughly corresponded to wordcount, but your wordcount-per-trilogy has halved from ~650k (Elantris, Mistborn 1, Warbreaker) to ~325k (Mistborn 1.5, Stormlight-without-interludes, Reckoners) so I must have that wrong... but I'm not sure why that's wrong.
I plot these like a trilogy each. The entire [Reckoners] trilogy, for example, is shorter than the way of kings. I plot a book of Stormlight using similar (though not exactly the same) methods as I use in building a series of other books.
What does "like a trilogy" mean? Or is there somewhere you'd recommend I go to learn more? From my uneducated perspective, "like a trilogy" means "long, lots of stuff happens, three books".
Well, what makes a book for me is usually an arc for a character mixed with a plot arc. Often multiple plot arcs and character arcs. It is less "stuff happens" and more "stuff happens for a reason, building to pivotal moments or discoveries." My YouTube writing lectures might help explain better. Look for the ones on plotting.
I think I understand...maybe...
Do I have that right?
Yup. You've got it. Though often, the difference in a longer book is the number of arcs. For example, in Mistborn, Vin has multiple arcs. (Learning to be part of a crew, training to use the magic, practicing to join high society, falling in love, and learning to trust again.) Those are mixed with a large number of plot arcs. A shorter book might have a character with a more straightforward, single or double arc.
My first encounter with the term "story arc" was from J Michael Straczynski talking about Babylon 5 in explaining how it was plotted.
The term to me invokes a visual of tracing an arc across the sky from left to right, symbolizing the journey of an overarching plot or narrative to its conclusion.
Brandon was using trilogy with respect to the Mistborn series until Shadows of Self got away from him and became two books bumping the total to four :-).
That's almost right. I wrote Alloy of Law as a stand alone test of the new era. I liked it, so I plotted a trilogy to go alongside it. I ended up writing Bands of Mourning before Shadows of Self for various reasons, but it isn't that Shadows of Self got turned into two books. Those were always two very different books in the outline.
The point where things expanded was after I tried out Alloy of Law, liked it, and decided to do more books with the characters.
So the scene at the end of Oathbringer, when Odium is confronting Taravangian and he uses futuresight to expand upon the Diagram, we have this blacked out section with Renarin's name linked to it.
Yes.
Is that because Renarin's abilities interfere with Odium's futuresight similar to how electrum interferes with atium?
Any time that someone else is seeing the future in the cosmere, it's going to have ripples against your ability. Like they are-- you can't-- It's the same sort of thing that if-- someone who has access to atium is going to mess up anyone else's futuresight in any way, because once you use that it's going to cause you to act differently, which then-- And remember futuresight is not very good in the cosmere anyway. But yeah, it's just gonna mess things up.
Does Harmony have Straff Venture's hidden atium?
Harmony has everything he needs, but that doesn't answer your question. No, Harmony does not have Straff's atium.
How has The Alloy of Law impacted your overall plans for events on Scadrial? Is it part of the original set of trilogies you had mapped out?
To worldbuild the urban fantasy trilogy coming up, I need to know everything that happened in the intervening centuries. Some stories popped up in there that I knew would happen, that would be referenced in the second trilogy. So I thought, why don't I tell some of these stories, to cement them in my mind and to keep the series going.
My understanding is that The Alloy of Law is intended to be more or less a stand-alone book. However, without giving too much away, it feels like there is a whole lot more of Wax's story to be told. When's the sequel coming?
I will most likely write a sequel. However, what you've got to remember is that I will be writing that future trilogy, the urban fantasy trilogy. The events in this book are of relation to what's happening in the future, so you will find out eventually the answers to the questions this book gives you, even if a sequel to this book never comes. But I more than likely will write more of these books over the next few years. The Stormlight Archive is my main focus following the Wheel of Time; I don't want to leave people hanging too much where that's concerned. But between books I will probably write more about these characters.
Are Mistings exposed to the "burning bad alloy or wrong metal" problem (hurting them), like Mistborn are?
Good question. I don't know if they can even sense an off alloy of their metal.
One interesting aspect of the book that I haven't mentioned yet comes with the metal of tin. Originally, tin wasn't one of the Allomantic metals—I used silver instead. You see, I originally paired silver and pewter together, thinking that pewter had a significant amount of silver in it. Well, turns out that isn't the case. (Remember, each set of paired metals is a metal and an alloy made from it.)
My false impression on the belief that pewter is a silver/lead alloy goes back to my childhood. I remember when I used to paint lead fantasy figures that I bought at the local hobby store. One of the employees told me that they would be going up in price because the manufacturers wanted the figures to be safer. They were going to cast them out of pewter instead of lead, because pewter is much less toxic. I asked what the difference between pewter and lead was, and the employee told me that pewter is lead PLUS silver, and that's why the figures cost more.
He meant tin, I guess. Either way, that's stayed with me for quite a long time. I soundly resisted changing silver to tin during the first drafts of the book, even when I found out the truth. The problem is, I really liked the name "Silvereye" for those who burn silver/tin. It sounds far slicker than "Tineye."
I eventually came around, however. Consistency in the magic system is more important than a single cool-sounding name. I blame Hobby Town in Lincoln Nebraska for my pains.
And are there parts-- Are the cosmere novels chronological so far? So when you eventually go back to Warbreaker the effects of Vasher being on Roshar...
Oh, no, they are not all going to be chronological. Most of them have been chronological so far, but we are getting to the point where they're stopping to be because like Way of Kings was before Alloy but now we've gone back and done Words of Radiance which is a jump backward and then we are going to be jumping to the next Alloy which is a jump forward. I'm pretty sure that's how it goes.
What's the incentive of alloying lerasium and becoming a misting when you could just burn it normal and be a Mistborn?
My guess is that you'd presumably you'd use less of it? Also, arguably, not every way of using a magic is going to be the most optimal way.
It's probably just a way that lerasium can work. If you alloy it or somehow mix it with things from other systems, it's quite possible you'd end up getting those magics instead, because it'd Connect you more strongly to a different Shard.
The replies to this are correct.
When does the Wax and Wayne series take place compared to The Stormlight Archive?
Just after.
Thank you! So after Stormlight 10, then comes The Alloy of Law? I have noticed a change in Hoid in these books since.
Alloy is somewhere after Stormlight 5.
The ninth metal. It was difficult to decide what this one would do. I wanted something opposite, yet complimentary, to the power of atium. So, I decided that it would give a kind of skewed perspective of the past, kind of like atium gives a limited view of the future. Obviously, this will come back into the plot later.
I do worry that it took too long to get to this scene. You've probably been wondering for quite a long time what the ninth metal did–and that concerns me, because if you wonder it, you'll also wonder why Vin herself didn't get around to figuring out what it was.
The problem is, this really is the first place I could work it in. Allomancy is a very complicated magic system, and I wanted plenty of time for you to get used to it before I delved into its more odd aspects.
So, Mistborn, as you said, was originally planned, and I think still is, a trilogy of trilogies, and also you've got the Stormlight at the moment that you say is one to watch. Can you give us any insight to what's to come in the future, and is it in some ways hard to let go of the original trilogy? I know you've done the standalone, but then to really move on.
Letting go of the original trilogy will be kind of hard. But in some ways, it'll have to. Because the original trilogy has become the mythology and lore of the world, which is really fun to work with as a writer. Beyond that, there are continuing characters. There was always planned to be continuing characters. I can't say much without giving spoilers, but there are characters from the original trilogy appearing in this book, several of them. Some of them are hidden. You're going to have to search and figure out who's who. Some of them are less hidden.
In the future, the second trilogy's going to be one that deals with a... By this point, in the world—and Alloy of Law is the same case—there are no Mistborn anymore. There are only Mistings, for various reasons that I don't want to give spoilers on, but there are Mistings. The second trilogy happens in a modern setting when we get to that. Alloy of Law is in an industrial setting. In the modern setting, there we will be doing a story eventually about a Mistborn serial killer and a SWAT team of Allomancers who... We're talking people with machine guns and, you know, Navy SEAL Allomancers whose job it is to hunt down Allomancer criminals, and then they'll reveal something, um...unexpected, how about that.
When is the next Mistborn coming out?
It will probably come out after the next Way of Kings. Next Way of Kings is next Christmas, the next Alloy of Law era book is probably the following Spring or something like that.
Are you planning two more or three more?
I will do as many of those as strikes me. Because The Alloy of Law books are a deviation from the main world plotline. So those are for fun. I'm not going to commit to how many I'll do or not do.
I got a question about this and last week's epigraph.
The metals Fused use. How come nobody knows, guesses or even suspects that aluminium and its alloys are Investiture resistant? They know you can Soulcast something into aluminium, so they should also know it's impossible to Soulcast aluminium into something else.
And once they know about metal that cannot be Soulcast, they start experimenting with fabrials - they used that in construction of Fourth Bridge - and then the logical step is to test it against Shardblades.Probably experimenting with alloys of aluminium, too.
Yet the metal Fused use to make weapons resistant to Shardweapons is a mystery to them?
I feel like I'm missing something here.
They're getting to answers here. Problem is, metallurgy just isn't a big science on Roshar. I feel it's one of those things that is more easy to see externally than internally--and do remember that there are things like god metals (Shardblades, for example) that also behave strangely around investiture. They have far more experience with those than aluminum, which is more of a little historical oddity to them than a big revolutionary part of science. Add to that the fact that some of the metals the fused are using aren't aluminum, and...well, I don't think it's as obvious a leap as you're making it out to be.
So the Fused's fabrials are not 100% aluminum based? Or they are and they are struggling to reach that conclusion?
I think what you're asking will be answered in the book, so I'll RAFO for now.
In Alloy of Law, were you influenced by steampunk stuff?
Yes, I did. I love steampunk. I would say Rithmatist is a little bit more directly influenced. Alloy of Law is more influenced by... When I pitched Mistborn to my editor, I pitched it as a continuum. The idea being that I would take a fantasy world and grow it all the way up straight from epic fantasy, classic times, up straight through science fiction, where the magic is running through all of it. And I'd never seen that done before. So, I pitched it as nine books, it's probably gonna be more than that. But that was definitely an influence on me. A bigger influence are the Edgar Allen Poe detective stories, which are some of my favorites. I would say those were a big influence on me in developing this. So, yes.
So, this is what I wanted to have in chapter one (see the last annotation.) Reading it again, I can see–yet again–why that was a bad instinct. It's much better here, in chapter two. I still feel that it's a tad long. I cut it down significantly (if you can believe that.) I worry that pacing wise, we spend too long in a fight for this early in the book. However, some of the things I get across in this battle are invaluable for the rest of the story. I introduce the Watcher, and I get rid of Vin's atium–thereby compounding the large danger of the kingdom being at war with the more personal danger of Vin being stalked while she's exposed without any atium.
We'll get to a third level of danger–that of something threatening the entire world–later on.
I wanna know about Alloy of Law, if there was an actor who was going to play Wayne, who would you--
Oh who would I cast to play Wayne in Alloy of Law? I have no idea. I don't cast characters. I pay a lot of attention to directors but I feel like the best actors are the ones that always surprise you. Like if you were to tell me Matthew McConaughey was doing what he did these last couple of years, if you would have said that ten years ago, I would have laughed at you right, because the best actors can do so many different things. So I don't know, I have no idea who I'd cast. The only actors I've ever really cast in my books, if you guys have read... Legion, about a guy who's schizophrenic but not really, he sees hallucinations but they help him solve crimes; I cast all the hallucinations as actors, so if you pay close attention you can tell who each of these hallucinations are because a lot of them are famous actors. Except for Kalyani who's a friend of mine.
Why do the Twinborn in Alloy of Law have only one Feruchemical power, when all previous Feruchemists, in spite of breeding programs, could use all the metals?
Or were Ferrings always part of the system and we just didn't meet them in Mistborn?
The Ferrings are a new development since Mistborn, as the Feruchemists have been interbreeding with the Allomancers. Basically, the Allomancy genes interfere with the Feruchemy genes, breaking it down and creating the limitations we see in Alloy of Law.
So you've previously described gemhearts as Investiture leaking into the Physical Realm in a similar kind of process to atium. Now atium had a way of-- the Investiture used in the creation of it-- of returning back to the kind of background pool of Investiture on Scadrial. Is there a way of the Investiture used in the creation of gemhearts to return to the Roshar Investiture pool?
Yes.
There is? Have we had any hints of it at all?
Yes.
Preservation can fuel Allomancy, (minus atium.) but can Ruin fuel Hemalurgy? (Or atium?) And could Sazed fuel all three Metallic Arts?
Both gods could, if they wanted, fuel all of the Metallic Arts. Preservation is stronger at fueling Allomancy, Ruin stronger at fueling Allomancy or Feruchemy when it has been given via a spike. Both are balanced when it comes to Feruchemy. But this rarely comes up in the books, as it required expending power in a way that the gods were hesitant to do.
Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration of Wayne, and if that was perhaps based off someone you know?
The fun story about Wayne, the beginnings of Alloy of Law were a short story that I wrote where Wayne was the protagonist, and MeLaan was his trusty steed in a horse's body. It was a guy who put on different hats to change personalities, riding into a small town in the Roughs, talking to his horse. Who, then, at the end of the first scene, talked back to him. It was a fun scene. It was way too weird. After I finished that scene, I'm like, "This guy is great. But this guy needs someone else to play off of. And it can't be his talking horse, because this story is just too out there."
Why did I start writing that story? The initial idea is a person who changes personalities based on hats. You put on a hat, and it lets you kind of have a focus for your acting, to get into a role and become someone. That was really fun to me. In fact, in the original story, he was a hatmaker. He was a haberdasher. And he understood people by the headgear that they like.
Which, if gonna be honest and trace it back, probably goes back to Thrawn. I love Thrawn, from the original Star Wars books by Timothy Zahn. And Thrawn was somebody who would look at the art that a culture produces and use that to come to understand them in ways that he could then use to conquer them. Which was just always so cool to me. Like, that's one of the coolest villain concepts, is this art appreciation villain who really gets to know a culture by studying their art, and then crushes them and dominates them. Just wonderful. I'm always kind of looking for characters who see the world in an interesting way. That's probably it. I don't think I was thinking that when I came up with Wayne.
But then, Wayne needed someone to bounce off against. Wayne needed a straight man, so to speak. And he just wasn't working. So that's when I started plotting Alloy of Law, the actual novel. The short story did not become the novel. The short story taught me that there was enough there that I was interested in that I really wanted to tell a story in this era. And it told me that there's something about this character that's gonna work if I can find the right vehicle to include them in a story.
That's our origins of Wayne. I think I can probably also look at the Sherlock Holmes dynamic, Sherlock and Watson. Any time I'm building a mystery duo or team, there's a bit of Sherlock and Watson going around in the back of my head.
Do you ever feel stifled? Now that you’ve got a couple of different lines going in different worlds that have your next 40 years planned out?
Yes and no. I do start to feel a little stifled, and so you’ll see me do random side projects. It’s my steam valve to blow that pressure off, and then I get back to what I’m working on. That basically why you have Alloy of Law, because as much as I would’ve liked to have jumped right into the next Wheel of Time Book, I couldn’t. After writing Towers of Midnight, I was feeling too creatively stifled, and so I had to go take a break, and let myself for three months do whatever I wanted. And Alloy of Law came out of that.
So that is how I do it. That’s where Rithmatist came from, that’s where Steelheart came from, that’s kind of where Alcatraz came from, these non-mainland books, that’s where they are going to come from. You can anticipate me doing that more often in the future. It is a different life for me now that when I was unpublished, and could just write whatever I wanted, and things like that, but at the same time, I have long loved the big epic series, and I’ve always wanted to do one. That’s why I built what I built. I didn’t do it because “Oh, this is what sells, I have to do this.” I did this because I wanted to have this big grand epic. That’s why I built the Cosmere books as I did.
So I don’t feel stifled in that at all, even though I’ll finish one book than be like “Man, I can’t go into the next one of these” and go and do something different, because it’s my grand plan. You know, it’s the thing I’ve wanted to do. So I hope that people will stick with me for all these books, because I’ll do a lot of them. But they will fit together in some really cool ways once they are all done. I think you’ll be very very impressed, but that’s a while off
Could you soulcast atium from god-metal into god-wood?
Soulcasting atium would take a heap-ton of Investiture. You'd need a huge source to power that.
