After accidentally unleashing the malevolent god Ruin, Vin and her husband Elend, now a Mistborn as well, must find a way to stop the end of the world. To do so, they’ll need to follow clues left by the Lord Ruler himself in underground storage caches scattered across the Final Empire. But the mists have crept out into the day while ashfalls and earthquakes wreck havoc on the land. With the prophecy surrounding the Hero of Ages apparently just a manipulative ruse by Ruin, is there another hero will who arrive to save mankind from extinction?
Unlike The Well of Ascension, which was weighed down by unnecessary plot threads, the final volume dispenses with most of that to deliver an action-packed finale (although Sanderson still manages to throw in two costume ball scenes). After focusing on Allomancy and Feruchemy in the first two books, Sanderson turns to the third and final magic system: hemalurgy, which powers the nearly-invincible Steel Inquisitors, now under the control of Ruin. This is accomplished mostly through the chapter-opening epigraphs, which are written from a future point of view, rather than 1000 years in the past as the epigraphs from the first two books were. These epigraphs are the most straightforward of the three books, but at times it felt like a lot of the worldbuilding was being sucked out of the narrative and put in the epigraphs. That might not have been a bad thing, as the worldbuilding might have overtaken the plot, but one part of the climax is unfortunately spoiled because of it.
The ending is very satisfying and one can tell that Sanderson spent an immense amount of time constructing this world, its history, people and magic, as everything seems to click into place but in a way that does not feel contrived. However, even after reading almost 2000 pages about these characters, I still felt no real emotional connection to them, and I was less concerned with their fates than with what happened next in the plot. Overall, the series presented a different take on fantasy tropes while at the same time building an impressive world with unique magic. As this is supposed to be the first trilogy in a trilogy of trilogies, I am interested in seeing where Sanderson decides to take the series in future volumes.
