The Hero of Ages
by Brandon Sanderson
TOR Books
758 pages
$14.99

The Hero of Ages is a long and complicated novel, the final volume in Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy.

Any novel following the lives of a dozen different characters, with a major focus on about a third of them, has to be complex.

And a book that has two volumes of backstory totalling some 1,400 pages may be a bit much for anyone to make sense of.

I would certainly recommend reading Mistborn and The Well of Ascension before tackling this one.

On the other hand, it is only in this final book that you learn at last the significance of the Mistborn designation.

Over 1,000 years ago, there was a struggle between two cosmic forces – call them Preservation and Ruin.

Into the middle of the struggle came a man who would eventually come to be known as the Lord Ruler, a man who chanced upon god-like powers and during his first use of them, when they were at their peak of possibility, made a number of crucial mistakes.

Chief among these, as we learn from the little prologues that begin each chapter, was actually moving the planet out of its orbit and too close to its sun.

To keep the planet habitable, he had to make some other changes, shrouding the world with ash and with mists to reflect some of the sun’s rays away.

In addition, he monkeyed with the human stock of the world, creating half a dozen different races and giving them variations of the ability to manipulate psychic powers by the ingestion and internal activation of small amounts of a dozen or so different metals.

A breakdown of these metals and what they allow a person to do is provided at the end of each volume.

A list and short bios of the characters would also have been useful, but Wikipedia is useful for that.

In addition, Sanderson indicates that there are notes and commentary on his website, https://brandonsanderson.com, though what I found was an engaging 12-minute video about where the ideas that anchor the books came from.

In this volume, the Lord Ruler, who lived for 1,000 years, is dead, killed by Vin, a Mistborn allomancer, who did not know that she was unleashing a force that might end the world.

Her husband, Elend Venture, a former nobleman and scholar, has been transformed into an allomancer and is trying to find a way to unite the cities as Emperor, for the purpose of preventing what appears to be a looming worldwide cataclysm.

The ash is falling thicker and the mists, formerly creepy but benign, have begun killing people, and lingering around all day instead of just appearing at night.

Plants won’t grow, and the temperature is rising.

It appears that the Lord Ruler had established caches of foodstuffs and other edibles, as well as some plans for staving off disaster.

Vin and Eland may have helped to throw off his oppressive reign, with its rigid class and racial distinctions, but that meant they had to find the caches, persuade everyone to work together and find solutions.

There are lots of confrontations and battles in this part of the story, which is full of city sieges and intrigue.

We learn a great deal about the non-human races in this book, including how they came to be what they are and what their roles are in the struggle between Preservation and Ruin.

We learn more about how people who thought they were doing the right things, with pure motives, were actually being manipulated into making things worse.

While the early parts of the book seem busy, it turns out they were moving at a leisurely pace compared to what takes place at breakneck speed in the last several chapters.

The identity of the actual Hero of the Ages took me quite by surprise, as it turns out that, in the end, carefully considered knowledge is absolutely essential to be combined with the necessary actions in order to make things right.