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Here we are with the final entry in the original Mistborn trilogy.  It has been an excellent journey so far and I couldn’t wait to find out how the story ended.  As usual there are no spoilers for this particular book, but since this is the end of the series I highly recommend skipping this until you have read the first two books.

Another year has passed and all is not well on Scadrial.  Ruin, the malevolent force released at the end of the previous book, has been growing in power and is on the verge of fulfilling its desire to destroy the world.  Koloss led by Steel Inquisitors are marauding through the countryside, ashfall and earthquakes are occurring with alarming frequency, and the mists have begun appearing earlier and earlier and have begun to seemingly strike down people at random.  The only hope for our heroes appear to lay within the Lord Ruler’s hidden storage caches they discovered to exist at the end of the last book.  Desperate for the vital supplies and cryptic clues about fighting Ruin, Elend and Vin are struggling to secure the final two caches which lay in unfriendly hands.  With time running out Elend splits what remains of his forces between the two sites.  While Breeze, Sazed, and Spook travel to the city of Urteau to parlay with an erratic Skaa populist that has risen to power, Elend and Vin lead their army towards the heavily fortified city of Fadrex to secure the final store by any means necessary.

I liked this book a lot and definitely felt it provided a worthy end to the story.  Full of surprises and suspense, it also gave satisfying answers about the origins of the mists and what caused the drastic changes to the world.  I won’t give away the ending, but what I do want to say about it is: Wow, I did not see that coming!  For the book as a whole, the author did a great job in setting a tense, urgent mood, and I particularly liked the mysteries surrounding the storage caches.  I was often reminded of my favorite parts of Heretics of Dune, in particular the chapter in which Odrade uncovers the ruins of Sietch Tabr and the God Emperor’s message.

I also enjoyed that the story again explored a larger portion of this world.  It gave the book an even more epic scope than the others while allowing characters like Spook, TenSoon, and Sazed more page time as well.  There were again a few slow spots, this time on account of an unnecessary amount of time spent rehashing established information every few chapters or so.  My eagerness to read on gave me the momentum to speed through these parts, but what really bothered me was that this took away time I could have been getting more new story.  Don’t get me wrong, I thought this book was great.  I just wanted to get as much of it as possible in the pages provided!

Luckily for me there is indeed plenty of more story out there.  There are a couple of novellas associated with this trilogy and a follow-up series set a few hundred years after these events.  Further, as if all that wasn’t enough, I found out all of those works are part of an even larger collection of the author’s works known as the Cosmere, a shared universe in which some of his various other series take place (and eventually overlap).  Pretty safe to say my reading list is now well stocked for the immediate future.

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