The Mistborn Saga: the story so far

For a thousand years the Lord Ruler had held the Final Empire, ash fell from the sky every day, and the skaa worked the fields and were beaten for looking up. Kelsier, the only man ever to walk out of the Pits of Hathsin, came back from them a Mistborn with a plan: drain the empire's atium reserves, set the great houses tearing at each other, raise a skaa army, and take Luthadel while it burned.

He found Vin, a street thief surviving on a knack she did not know was Allomancy, and taught her to burn metals. She went into the nobility as Valette Renoux, learned the ballrooms, and fell for Elend Venture, who read philosophy at parties and wanted to change the country his father ran.

The plan came apart. Three quarters of the army died attacking a garrison. Marsh, Kelsier's brother, was taken by the Steel Inquisitors. Kelsier let the Lord Ruler kill him in the square in front of the whole city, because a dead Survivor was worth more to the skaa than a living thief, and the city rose the next day.

Vin faced the Lord Ruler and learned what he was. Not a god and not the Hero of Ages, but Rashek, a Terris packman who had murdered the Hero at the Well of Ascension and taken the power himself. His immortality ran on Feruchemical bracelets. Vin tore them off him and put a spear through him while a thousand years caught up with his body in seconds.

The empire fell in a day, Elend was left holding a city, and nobody knew what came after.

A year on, Elend Venture was king of Luthadel under a law he had written himself, and three armies were camped outside it. His father Straff wanted the city, Ashweather Cett wanted it, and Jastes Lekal had bought twenty thousand koloss with counterfeit money he could not keep paying.

Elend tried to govern through an Assembly, and the Assembly voted him out under his own rules and installed Lord Penrod. Tindwyl, a Terriswoman, spent the siege teaching him how to look and sound like a king. Vin spent it hunting something that walked the mists, and being courted by Zane, Straff's Mistborn son and Elend's half-brother, who told her she was a knife and should stop pretending otherwise. She chose Elend, and killed Zane for it.

Straff pulled back to let the koloss gut Luthadel so he could arrive afterwards as its saviour. The defence cost Clubs, Dockson and Tindwyl their lives. Vin discovered she could take the koloss army by Allomancy, turned it around, and broke Straff with it.

Underneath all of it she had been following the Hero of Ages prophecy to the Well of Ascension beneath the Lord Ruler's palace. She reached the power and released it rather than take it, because the texts said the Hero must give it up. The texts had been rewritten. Something ancient came out of the Well announcing that it was free at last.

Elend, dying of a wound, was made Mistborn with a bead of the Lord Ruler's lerasium. Sazed, holding Tindwyl's body, stopped believing in any of the three hundred religions he had spent his life preserving.

The thing Vin released called itself Ruin, and it had spent an age hidden inside the prophecy it had been quietly editing. Ash fell heavily enough to bury cities, the mists began killing people in daylight, and the ground shook. Ruin could not finish the job outright, because Preservation had long ago hidden part of its power where Ruin could not find it.

Vin and Elend went city to city opening the Lord Ruler's storage caverns, each holding food, water and directions to the next. Spook held Urteau while burning tin hard enough to wreck his own senses. Sazed worked through three hundred religions looking for one that was true. TenSoon stood trial before his own kind and convinced the kandra that the ending their prophecies described was happening now.

Ruin controlled anyone carrying a Hemalurgic spike, and that included Vin, through an earring she had worn since childhood without ever asking what it was. At Fadrex, Marsh surfaced through Ruin's grip long enough to tear it out, and Vin could finally reach Preservation's power in the mists.

Marsh killed Elend. Elend had already spent his army burning every scrap of atium in the world, which was Ruin's hidden body, so there was nothing left for it to recover. Vin took up Preservation and destroyed Ruin, and the two of them went together.

Sazed was the Hero of Ages. Holding both powers, he remade a world that had been dying since before the Lord Ruler, with blue sky and green things growing in it. Spook, Ham and Breeze walked out into it, found Vin and Elend lying in flowers, and found the book Sazed had left explaining all of it.

Three hundred years after Harmony remade the world, Elendel had electric light, railways and revolvers, and Waxillium Ladrian was a lawman out in the Roughs until the day he shot Lessie by accident while trying to save her from a killer.

Five months later his uncle and sister were dead in a carriage accident and he was Lord Ladrian, head of a bankrupt house, sitting in a study in the city negotiating a marriage of convenience with Lady Steris Harms. Wayne turned up, stole several things on the way in, and told him about the Vanishers, a gang robbing railway cars and taking hostages off them.

The Vanishers tried to take Steris and her half-sister Marasi from a wedding. Wax got Marasi back and lost Steris. The gang's leader was Miles Dagouter, called Hundredlives, a former lawman with Feruchemical healing who had decided the law was a story the rich told, and who could not be killed by anything Wax was carrying.

They took him during an aluminium train robbery, and Marasi turned out to be an Allomancer herself, able to slow time inside a bubble. Miles was arrested and executed, certain to the end that he had been right.

The robberies had been insurance fraud all along, run by Lord Edwarn Ladrian, Wax's uncle, who was not dead and was working for something called the Set. And in a quiet epilogue Marasi was handed a book by Marsh, the last of the Steel Inquisitors, still walking around three centuries later.

Wax was chasing a thug called the Marksman when a larger case took him: the governor's brother murdered, then crime bosses, then the city's only Steelrunner found dead with a Hemalurgic spike in her.

Harmony spoke to him directly and named the killer. Paalm, a kandra Harmony had once sent to watch over Wax, had torn out her own controlling spike, given herself stolen powers, and started calling herself Bleeder. She wanted to prove Harmony was a tyrant who used people as tools, and she was setting Elendel alight to make the argument. Harmony sent MeLaan to help, and Wayne fell for her.

Bleeder wore a priest's face to murder a Survivorist and put the religions in the streets against each other, then went for the governor. Wax chased her across a city that was burning behind him.

He cornered her on a bridge and she took Lessie's face, because she had been Lessie. Paalm had spent those years in the Roughs beside him wearing that body, and the woman Wax shot in the church had been her. Rather than be put back under Harmony's control she made him kill her, and he did it a second time.

Claude Aradel took the governorship, the first man to hold it without a noble name. MeLaan warned Marasi about a spike made of a metal nobody could identify, and about an old god called Trell. Wax stopped answering his door.

A kandra called VenDell brought Wax a photograph of a temple in the far south and a claim that the Bands of Mourning were real: the Lord Ruler's own metalminds, which would hand whoever wore them the powers of a Mistborn and a Feruchemist at once. Wax went because his sister Telsin, missing since the carriage accident that had never been an accident, was somewhere in it.

He took Wayne, Marasi, Steris and MeLaan to New Seran, found the Set running the local nobility, was framed for a murder at a party, and ran for Dulsing. In a Set warehouse they found a broken flying ship powered by Allomancy and a prisoner named Allik, from a people in the frozen south who build them.

The temple was empty. The Bands had been reforged into the spearhead on the statue standing outside it the whole time.

Edwarn Ladrian was leading the Set's expedition, and Telsin was not his prisoner. She was his partner. She shot her brother repeatedly and let him fall into a pit. Wax met Harmony in the space between and was sent back, and Marasi took up the Bands and pulled him out.

Edwarn was captured, Telsin got away, and Wax married Steris because he wanted to rather than because the house needed the money. Then a red-eyed servant walked into Edwarn's cell and killed him, and the man with a spike through his eye, whom Allik's people had taken for the returned Lord Ruler, turned out to be Kelsier, three hundred years dead and not dead at all.

Six years on, Wax had hung up the guns and taken a senate seat, and Wayne was still a constable. Elendel and the outer cities were close enough to civil war that the Set did not need to do much to tip them.

Telsin Ladrian ran the Set now, and the god behind it was not a myth. Trell was Autonomy, a Shard trying to force its way onto Scadrial, and the Set was building it a door and a bomb, a device of harmonium and trellium that would take Elendel off the map.

Marasi worked the invasion end with the Ghostbloods, an organisation from beyond the world run by Kelsier, who had never entirely stopped existing. She shut the portal down and Autonomy's forces never landed.

Wax and Wayne hit the Set's base, killed a good part of it, faced Telsin, and found no bomb. It was already on a ship steering for the city. The device could be disarmed, but whoever did it would die in the doing. Wayne pushed Wax clear and did it himself.

Telsin died when Autonomy let go of her and left her body to carry what it had been holding. Elendel stood. Harmony had spent the whole book barely able to act, held in check by something older than either of them.

Wax lived to grow old with Steris and their children in a tower above a city that put up a statue of Wayne. The war that Era One's survivors had made a world to prevent had turned out to be one battle in a much larger one, and Scadrial had just been told it was not alone.