In our previous episode, we detailed the spark of rebellion ignited by the Survivor of Hathsin
himself, Kelsier, which would ultimately bring even the God-like Lord Ruler to his knees.
As Vin removed the feruchemical jewelry, ensuring the Lord Ruler's immortality up until this point,
she forever altered the very direction of Scadrial. In all of Rashek's planning to combat
the overwhelming power of Ruin, he had never anticipated that a mere year before the Well
of Ascension was to refill, he would be brought low by a Mistborn, even one as powerful as Vin.
With his defeat, the entirety of the Final Empire was thrown into disarray,
with warlords and tyrants rushing to fill the power vacuum. Throughout this episode,
we will describe this power struggle through the lens of the Siege of Luthadel,
the return of the Deepness, and the refilling of the Well of Ascension.
In the dying days of the Lord Ruler's dominion, a bloody revolution was waged upon the streets of
Luthadel. The Skaa had been persecuted and belittled for close to millennia. They now
chose to reap the crop the Nobility had sewed on that bloody night. In their justified anger, they
moved through the streets, attacking the domains of the Noble houses. As chaos and destruction had
begun to grasp at the very hearts of the people of Luthadel, one man, horrified by what he had been
forced to witness, refused to allow the chaos to take over and was eager to restore order.
It was Elend Venture, who had already become enamored with Vin, a feeling both parties shared.
The son of one of the strongest nobles of the realm Straff Venture,
Elend used the strength of his rhetoric and conviction and proved his true mettle that
day. Abandoned by his father, his first action was to bring his guardsmen to Keep
Lekal to have sufficient numbers to prevent the outright slaughter of their Houses.
He then came with a token force of five soldiers to personally surrender to Dockson and convince
the resistance leader to stop attacking the Houses, as they would not retaliate if left alone.
Dockson then informed him that Vin had made her way to Kredik Shaw to meet the Lord Ruler head-on.
This brought a bitter chill to the spine of the heir of House Venture as the love of his life
now faced a supposed insurmountable task. To buy time for the Mistborn,
Elend was joined by a Skaa named Goradel and his soldiers and led an assault on Kredik Shaw to buy
time for Vin to find a vial of metal that would ultimately save her life and doom the Lord Ruler.
He then attempted to find any aid which would be forthcoming for his love. In the process,
he and Sazed came across a group of bloodthirsty Skaa who were slaughtering the palace guard
despite their attempts to surrender. Elend could not bear witness to such slaughter and,
to the shock of all gathered there, began to speak. The man who considered himself a scholar
above all else found the courage and spoke against violence. He refused to accept bloodshed and chaos
as the foundations of any new state. Unbeknownst to the young scion of House Venture, Breeze worked
silently in the background soothing the anger of the Skaa, which made them more willing to
listen to the hated nobleman. He continued and shared with the Skaa his dream of a brighter,
fairer world, one where the Central Dominance could achieve stability and a better life for
all through it. The power of his words tore through the crowd like a torrent,
and the anger which had dominated the Skaa up until this point was washed away by a tide of
emotion as the onlookers proclaimed Elend as the first king of the Central Dominance.
According to Sazed, who told of the event to Vin: "... the things he said, Mistress... his
dreams of a new government, his condemnation of bloodshed and chaos... Well, Mistress, I fear that
I cannot repeat it. I wish I'd had my metalminds, so that I could have memorized his exact words."
After the downfall of the Lord Ruler had been confirmed,
Elend and Vin were immediately presented with positions of immense responsibility.
Elend was forced to reinvent his new domain and attempted to implement many of the philosophies
his favored literature had forwarded as being the correct basis to establish a new political entity.
Vin aided in this endeavor through the moral support she provided and her more recent religious
position within the Church of the Survivor. This entity filled that which had been left
vacant following the deposition of the Lord Ruler and the Steel Ministry. Without a God to attach
their hopes to, the Skaa turned to Kelsier, who was revered as the Lord of the Mists following his
seeming return from the dead. As someone closest to Kelsier, Vin was granted an exceptionally high
status within the pantheon, with his crew being viewed with a degree of religious fanaticism.
All of this came to the chagrin of Sazed, who had made his way into the countryside to revive the
long-dead religions of Scadrial. Yet despite his tireless efforts, the attempts at proselytizing
the populace could not match the swift expansion of the Church of the Survivor within Luthadel
and beyond. In his role as a Keeper, Sazed continued to teach the peoples of Scadrial
the long-lost knowledge which now existed only in his copperminds. While doing this, he made his
way South, as that was the direction the rumors of the Eleventh Metal had once reached Kelsier.
However, the farther he moved from Luthadel, the more brutal and chaotic the area became.
Without the admittedly vicious supervision of the agents of the Lord Ruler, the other dominances had
begun to devolve into isolated pockets of civilization amidst a torrent of violence,
hatred, and bloodshed. These people cared little for religion, and in this regard,
Sazed endeavored to teach them more practical matters to lessen the harshness of their
situation. After a year or so of such travels, Sazed began to doubt himself, going so far as to
question whether the people would have been better off had the rebellion failed. At this point,
he also began to happen upon a series of mysterious deaths, which the Skaa villagers
insisted were due to the Mists, which left more questions than answers for the Terrisman.
Sazed was found by Marsh, who was still nominally an inquisitor. He convinced the Terris Keeper to
accompany him to the Conventical of Seran in the Eastern Dominance - a major stronghold of
the Canton of Inquisition, where new Inquisitors were created through the
implantation of hemalurgic spikes. Yet it is not for this reason that Marsh sought to return
to this dark and brutal laboratory; instead, it was because the fortress was now deserted,
with all of the servants within slaughtered and the Inquisitors mysteriously absent.
Here Sazed discovered the final words of Kwaan engraved upon a metal plate, where he admitted
to having betrayed Alendi in the end to prevent the completion of his quest. Marsh, however,
had begun to act oddly, which was entirely out of character for him. Rather than allow
Sazed to translate the inscription on the spot, he forced the Keeper to copy it with charcoal. Still,
getting this information motivated Sazed to return to Luthadel and begin to research the inscription.
However, unbeknownst to Sazed and perhaps even Marsh, Ruin had begun to influence the Inquisitors
through the hemalurgic spikes and could now alter most of the texts was not etched in metal. Sazed
promptly left the Conventical as Marsh had now disappeared and, on his way back, came upon a
village where most of the skaa had apparently died of starvation and dehydration within their homes.
The single survivor claimed that the mists had continued to kill people and have ill
effects on the Skaa. Sazed brought the man to safety while he further decided that his return
to Luthadel must be as hasty as possible. There was more wrong with the world than the violence
due to the power vacuum left in the Lord Ruler's absence. Sazed now knew that a more evil presence
than bandits and warlords was at work in Scadrial. Back in Luthadel, Vin's position within the Church
granted Elend a degree of legitimacy as the first king of the Central Dominance. The king
now believed his position to be stable enough to integrate a previously unheard degree of democracy
into the governance of the Central Dominance. He created a new legal framework that established
the Luthadel Assembly, a parliamentary council of twenty-four Assemblymen. The representatives
came from all classes: eight noblemen, eight skaa workers, and eight skaa merchants. Elend would sit
at the head of this Assembly whenever they met. However, it was far from plain sailing for Elend,
who now felt secure enough in his position to ask for Vin's hand in marriage. Unfortunately,
this request was rejected out of hand, much to the king's dismay,
as Vin still lacked confidence despite her immense power and believed Elend deserved a better woman.
This was to be a portent of what was to come for the fledgling Kingdom of the Central Dominance,
as their stability was not to last. The army available to the Kingdom was a meager twenty
thousand poorly trained soldiers. Given the size of Luthadel, it was wholly insufficient to mount
a proper defense of the city. This weakness attracted the gaze of several pretenders,
eager to ensure that the peace King Elend had imposed would come crashing down around him.
Straff Venture, Elend's father, had declared himself King of the Northern Dominance and
brought the area into compliance using brutal methods, much in keeping with his personality
and views on the Skaa. Having done so, he then set his eyes on Luthadel: he viewed his son as a weak
puppet easy to overcome and wanted to gain access to the fabled atium cache of the Lord Ruler.
Lord Venture moved swiftly about a year from the collapse and brought with him a force of fifty
thousand soldiers, who he utilized to promptly lay siege to the former Capital of the Final Empire.
Yet this was not the full extent of Straff's strength as he also brought his illegitimate son
Zane, a potent Mistborn of questionable sanity. Despite a modicum of discontent within the
Assembly, Elend managed to pass a proposal that nothing would be done until he parlayed with his
father. The situation was further complicated by the emergence of another army of forty
thousand men. At its head was Ashweather Cett, an abrasive nobleman from Fadrex City.
Cett's action was initiated by Breeze's soothing, who had convinced the nobleman to make his way to
Luthadel. Therefore a tripartite balance of power had now been created: if Straff
or Cett were to attack, it would leave them vulnerable to an assault from the other party.
Even if they successfully took the city, the other army would march in and defeat the weakened force,
which now held a city with battered defenses and a less-than-welcoming populace.
Not long after, another Keeper and old friend of Sazed's, Tindwyl, made her way to the capital.
Her specialization was entirely different from that of the kindly Sazed,
as she focused primarily on leadership and history, which is why we like her more. As such,
she immediately began to mentor the young king, often forcefully as his precocious enthusiasm
would hold him back in the face of an increasingly dire situation and the apparent cataclysmic
events that continued to rock Scadrial. Sazed was not far behind his old friend,
but his trip was far more tumultuous than that of his fellow Keeper. As he made his way back to
Luthadel from the depths of the Conventical, he encountered many Koloss. Although this
would ordinarily be a fatal encounter, even for one as powerful as Sazed, the Koloss he
met acted strangely. They brought him back to a somewhat chaotic camp and their apparent leader,
Jastes Lekal. This former friend of Elend's had somehow found himself at the head of a force of
some twenty thousand Koloss, yet he feared his soldiers as much as any who came across them.
This horde of gargantuan blue-skinned warriors was on its way to Luthadel to obtain the Lord Ruler's
atium cache. Their approach could bring the already delicate balance of power around Luthadel
to a breaking point. Sazed was able to talk his way out of captivity and make his way to Luthadel
to warn the unwitting members of Kelsier's crew who remained within the city of what was yet to
come. He added to the growing list of worries for the First King of the Central Dominance and
the Heir of the Survivor the news that the mists had started killing those who ventured into them.
This news was greeted with a degree of skepticism, however.
With the arrival of the Koloss, Elend decided to venture out to negotiate with his father,
accompanied by Vin. Deep within the Venture camp, Elend offered an alliance to his father, allowing
his father to believe he was in possession of the atium cache. He further argued that Straff
could not win without his aid. However, his father responded with an unexpected development. He had
already concluded an alliance with Ashweather Cett and would only ally with Elend if he
were to surrender the city to him immediately. The alternative appeared to be death. In response,
Elend informed his father that Vin would kill Straff if something happened to him.
To demonstrate her power, Vin burned brass in conjunction with the newly discovered Duralumin.
This metal greatly enhanced the strength of other metals by releasing all of their power in a single
use rather than over time. This effectively soothed away all of Straff's emotion, which
left him terrified enough to concede and allow the pair to return to the safety of the city walls.
Shaken by this, Straff ordered his somewhat insane and mutinous son Zane, who had already been
stalking Vin, to assassinate his fellow Mistborn. While the parley was far from an unmitigated
disaster, as Vin and Elend escaped unharmed, they had merely passed from the frying pan into the
flames. The Assembly had met without Elend, utilizing a by-law that the king had placed
within their legal code, and passed a motion of no confidence. This immediately deposed the king
and set the scene for an unprecedented vote on who would now assume such a lofty role. Elend and his
supporters were caught at total unawares, and the fate of Luthadel, under a triple siege, had never
seemed as precarious. This uncertainty played into the hands of the besieging parties, as with the
wrong elected, the city may be surrendered without a fight. Yet hope remained, as the
remnants of Kelsier's crew had faced longer odds in the past and emerged from the shade of the Lord
Ruler's malice and hatred to forge a new future for their people. Elend and his supporters would
not give up the city without a fight, no matter how unlikely their success would be at that point.
However, this is the tale of our next video in this series. The next video in this series will be
dedicated to the continued political maneuverings and violent conclusion of the Siege of Luthadel,
but we are planning to cover the battles of many other fantasy, sci-fi, and space opera universes,
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