Mistborn 2 Chapter Fifty-Four
SpoilersChapter Fifty-four
Vin Versus A Whole Lot of Koloss
The Vin fight scene here is meant to be quick and a little bit abstract, giving you the sense that she's killed a lot without going into a lot of details on blocking and blow-by-blow. I figure you got enough fighting with Sazed, and now we need to advance the plot.
In this chapter, we have a number of really nice moments that hearken back to the first book. Vin mentions several of them directly. There's the scene where she spins around atop Kredik Shaw, looking at the fires in the night. We'll have a scene like this in book three—a city lit by fire in the night as things change. We got one in Book One as well. Also, we have a scene here with Vin her thinking about how useless it is to try fighting an army on her own, referencing the time Kelsier wanted to do just that, and Vin kept him back.
With this chapter, I'm pushing quickly for the end sequence. The real climax of the siege was meant to be Vin's arrival, and the rest of these chapters make for an unavoidable downswing. She still needs to save the city, and—now that she's arrived in time—I believe most readers are expecting her to succeed. The only question now is how she'll do it.
Vin Soothes the Koloss
She does it by Soothing the koloss. I think this is probably the easiest of the twists in the book—after all, I showed her doing the exact same thing to a kandra, then told you that kandra and koloss were very similar. So this shouldn't have been too much of a logical leap. If Vin hadn't been exhausted and overworked here, she probably would have figured it out earlier.
I thought it important, by the way, to show her fighting without her powers—and to show that she's still good, even when she doesn't have pewter steel or iron. She's a dangerous person. The metals just make her VERY dangerous.
By the way, I used Kelsier's last words—obliquely—as the thing that pulled her out of her stupor when she fell to the lack of pewter. She's been burning it far too much for this entire book, and hopefully you're expecting her to have to pay for that at some point. She would have dropped unconscious if she hadn't thought of her friends.
Kelsier would have been proud. His last words to her had been a chastisement, since she hadn't been treating their friends as well as she should have. He insisted on rescuing Spook from the cages, rushing into an obvious trap despite the danger. Vin has done nearly the same thing in returning to Luthadel.
Spoiler Note: If you haven't read Book Three, don't Show this Spoiler
When I was designing the Three Metallurgic Arts for these books, I knew that I wanted Hemalurgy to have a built in flaw. A flaw that, as a deconstructionalist might say, was created intentionally and relied upon by the very force hoping it won't exploit it.
It was important to me that Ruin eventually be brought down, in part, because of things he did or flaws in his power. Preservation could simply build into the humans he created an innate goodness, then expect them to do as he hoped that they would. Ruin had to be able to directly corrupt and influence people. He felt himself stronger because he could MAKE them do exactly as he wanted.
The problem is, for his magic to work—for him to exercise control over someone—he had to leave a hole, so to speak, that other people could wiggle through and use. And so the entire 'control the koloss' plot sequence in Book Two was intended to set up Hemalurgy, and in a way predict Ruin's fall.
Now, the only problem in all of this (for the heroes, at least) is that when Ruin actually got free, he was so strong that it was all but impossible for anyone else to 'get through' the holes that he had left in his Hemalurgists. But it wasn't impossible. In a way, the foreshadowing in this book was meant to lay the seed that Ruin's control of his minions is not absolute. And an individual who wanted to resist him had that potential.
Sazed and Vin Talk to Penrod
Penrod, by the way, is shell shocked. He's not thinking clearly—he's lost it because of the horror of what he's seen and been through. He was at one of the gates when they fell—he didn't just hide in the keep all the time.
The scene where Vin walks away with the koloss in the mists, sword over her shoulder, all of them making silhouettes. . .well, that's one I wish someone would do an artistic rendering of sometime.
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