Here is the first batch of annotations for The Alloy of Law. As with all of the other annotations here on the site, each annotation contains spoilers for the current chapter. Spoilers for chapters after the current one are hidden by spoiler tags. We recommend you read the book before reading the annotations! Also, please note that there are not yet annotations for the prologue or first chapter.

Chapter Five

Koloss-blooded

I’ve mentioned before, obliquely in interviews, that Sazed transformed the koloss duing his ascention. Part of what he did restored their sentience to more human levels, and he changed the way they interact with Hemalurgy. (And that’s all I’ll say about it for now.)

Anyway, yes, it’s possible for someone to be a koloss-blood. I’m reserving an explanation for precicely what this is, and how it works, for a future book.

Waxillium gets pushed to the brink, watching the robbery

I realize it’s amusing for people to think of the process of this book, which began as a “short” story. Perhaps I’ll post my original attempts at writing the book. As a matter of note, Wayne was the first person I imagined for this series. In very early notes I scribbled down, he was actually going to be a hatmaker. (If you can believe that.) He developed a long way from there.

Many of you may know that I wrote this book during my “time off” between finishing Towers of Midnight and starting A Memory of Light. However, the ideas for this story had been around for some time longer, perhaps a year or two. I decided I wanted to do some shorter stories between the first two larger-scale Mistborn trilogies, and . . . well, this is what “short” means to me, I guess.

Anyway, the first scene with Wayne I dabbled in (this was before the break) was him out in the Roughs riding into town on a kandra that had the body of a horse. It was a nice spin on a typical Western motif—instead of being the quiet gunman of Western cliché, he was a screwball hatmaker. And his horse was sentient and grumbling about having to carry him around; she wanted to get back into a human body as soon as possible.

The scene didn’t work, though. I didn’t get far into it. Wayne wasn’t working for me as a main viewpoint character at that time, and I hadn’t gotten around to filling out his character with the things he eventually became. (His “borrowing,” his love of accents, his good nature despite a dark past. Things like this grew as his character became more deep.)

The other thing that didn’t work in those original scenes was the fact that there was no Wax. Wayne needed someone to play off, someone to be dry and more solumn—but still make for good banter. And Wayne just wasn’t a leading man. The story was wrong when it was just about him. I needed to tell a story about someone else and fit him into it.

That brings us to this sequence. When I planned the original short story, this sequence at the party was going to be the end of it. The Vanishers weren’t in the book—it was just a simple gang of thieves taking a hostage. The prologue didn’t exist, as I’ve spoken of earlier. It was a more simple story of a man coming into his own and deciding to fight again after losing someone dear to him.

For that reason, this sequence here—this chapter with the next—may feel like a climactic sequence to you, of the stort you often find at the end of my books. Originally, this was going to be the ending. (Though by the time I reached this chapter in the writing, I’d already decided I was going to make the story much longer, and had greatly expanded my outline. Hints of the story’s origins can still be found, however. Note that we don’t get a Wayne or a Marasi viewpoint until after this sequence when we hit the expanded outline material.)