Return to #1 New York Times bestseller Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn world of Scadrial as its second era, which began with THE ALLOY OF LAW, comes to its earth-shattering conclusion in THE LOST METAL.
For years, frontier lawman turned big-city senator Waxillium Ladrian has hunted the shadowy organization the Set – with his late uncle and his sister among their leaders – since they started kidnapping people with the power of Allomancy in their bloodlines. When Detective Marasi Colms and her partner, Wayne, find stockpiled weapons bound for the Outer City of Bilming, this opens a new lead. Conflict between the capital, Elendel, and the Outer Cities only favors the Set, and their tendrils now reach to the Elendel Senate – whose corruption Wax and his wife, Steris, have sought to expose – and Bilming is even more entangled.
After Wax discovers a new type of explosive that can unleash unprecedented destruction and realizes that the Set must already have it, an immortal kandra serving Scadrial’s god, Harmony, reveals that Bilming has fallen under the influence of another god: Trell, worshipped by the Set. And Trell isn’t the only factor at play from the larger Cosmere – Marasi is recruited by offworlders with strange abilities who claim their goal is to protect Scadrial…at any cost.
Wax must choose whether to set aside his rocky relationship with God and once again become the Sword that Harmony has groomed him to be. If no one steps forward to be the hero Scadrial needs, the planet and its millions of people will come to a sudden and calamitous ruin.
My thoughts: this is a heck of a way to end Era Two of the Mistborn series. A huge bomb might just destroy Elendel if Wax and Wayne (plus Steris and Marasi) don’t stop it.
There’s visits from Death, Harmony (God) and even immortal heroes like Kell (the Survivor from Era One), all bringing stark warnings of danger from beyond. If army Autonomy is building enters their world, nothing they do will stop this foreign god defeating Harmony and destroying their world.
Wax’s sister is deeply involved in these nefarious plots and he knows he might have to kill her to stop things escalating. But she’s not the only one under thrall to Autonomy, and out in the town of Bilming all sorts of strange things are happening. With new allies from other worlds, and new metals, they might just be the heroes this rusting world needs. But there will be loss and sacrifice too.
I am a huge fan of the Mistborn series and was very excited to read this one. I am intrigued by the project Sanderson is creating with this series. Each era moves a little further forward in time and technology. So the next story cycle will be more advanced than these books, and the next even more so and so on.
Which means saying goodbye to this set of characters – Wax, Wayne, Steris, Marasi and the others will go on but not feature again. Some will, since gods and kandra are immortal, I imagine a few will appear here and there, but not the human ones. The Lost Metal is a fantastic, high stakes, ending, full of all of the adventure and chaos you want. And while we wait for the Third Era, time to read the whole series so far, again!
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 