He kills without remorse, casually justifying himself that anyone in the employ of the Empire is de facto evil and deserving of death.

But though the Final Empire he battles is indeed appallingly brutal to its lowest classes (the skaa, no more than slaves and most certainly less than human), Kelsier's own moral grey areas are blurred even further by his rationalizations, which he repeats by rote. Sanderson is a great deal more knowing than that, and casts his hero here as both a deconstruction and recapitulation of that archetype. Mistborn, had it simply been left to the contrivances of its plot, could have been just another groaningly tedious offering of the most clichéd premise that ever gathered dust in the storyteller's bargain bin: that of the valiant freedom fighter and his motley band of misfits sticking it to the man and waging war despite insurmountable odds against the forces of cruelty and oppression. With this book, Sanderson's considerable promise in Elantris is more than fulfilled. He takes his time with Mistborn, allowing his characters and the almost stifling atmosphere in which he dresses his story to envelop you. He is much more assured as a storyteller this time as well. Here we see Sanderson warming to the tropes he likes best - a special class of people who possess carefully defined magic abilities plucky heroines and roguish, devil-may-care heroes the role of religion in how civilizations develop - porting them over from Elantris and allowing their thematic possibilities to flower.

Brandon Sanderson matures remarkably in his second novel, a trilogy opener set in a land plagued by incessant volcanic ashfall and burdened by the millennia-long tyranny of its Lord Ruler, believed to be an embodiment of God himself.

The final empire