Mistborn: secret history

1

What Kelsier would have given for a pencil and paper.

Something to write on, some way to pass the time. A means of collecting his thoughts and creating a plan

of escape.

As the days passed, he tried scratching notes into the sides of the Well, which proved impossible. He tried

unraveling threads from his clothing, then tying knots in them to represent words. Unfortunately, threads

vanished soon after he pulled them free, and his shirt and trousers immediately returned to the way

they’d looked before. Fuzz, during one of his rare visits, explained that the clothing wasn’t real – or

rather, it was just an extension of Kelsier’s spirit.

For the same reason, he couldn’t use his hair or blood to write. He didn’t technically have either. It was

supremely frustrating, but sometime during his second month of imprisonment he admitted the truth to

himself. Writing wasn’t all that important. He’d never been able to write while confined to the Pits, but

he’d planned all the same. Yes, they had been feverish plans, impossible dreams, but lack of paper hadn’t

stopped him.

The attempts to write weren’t about making plans so much as finding something to do. A quest to soak up

his time. It had worked for a few weeks. But in acknowledging the truth, he lost his will to keep trying to

find a way to write.

Fortunately, about the time he acknowledged this, he discovered something new about his prison.

Whispering.

Oh, he couldn’t hear it. But could he “hear” anything? He didn’t have ears. He was… what had Fuzz said?

A Cognitive Shadow? A force of mind, holding his spirit together, preventing it from diffusing. Saze would

have had a field day. He loved mystical topics like this.

Regardless, Kelsier could sense something. The Well continued to pulse as it had before, sending waves of

writhing shock through the walls of his prison and out into the world. Those pulses seemed to be

strengthening, a continuous thrumming, like the sense bronze lent one in “hearing” people using

Allomancy.

Inside of each pulse was… something. Whispers, he called them – though they contained more than just

words. They were saturated with sounds, scents, and images.

He saw a book, with ink staining its pages. A group of people sharing a story. Terrismen in robes? Sazed?

The pulses whispered chilling words. Hero of Ages. The Announcer. Worldbringer. He recognized those

terms from the ancient Terris prophecies mentioned in Alendi’s logbook.

Kelsier knew the discomforting truth now. He had met a god, which meant there was real depth and

reality to faith. Did this mean there was something to that array of religions Saze had kept in his pocket,

like playing cards to stack a deck?

You have brought Ruin upon this world….

Kelsier settled into the powerful light that was the Well, and found – with practice – that if he submerged

himself in the center right before a pulse, he could ride it a short distance. It sent his consciousness

traveling out of the Well to catch glimpses of each pulse’s destination.

He thought he saw libraries, quiet chambers where distant Terrismen spoke, exchanging stories and

memorizing them. He saw madmen huddled in streets, whispering the words the pulses delivered. He saw

a Mistborn man, noble, jumping between buildings.

Something other than Kelsier rode with those pulses. Something directing an unseen work, something

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interested in the lore of the Terris. It took Kelsier an embarrassingly long time to realize he should try

another tactic. He dunked himself into the center of the pool, surrounded by the too-thin liquid light, and

when the next pulse came he pushed himself in the opposite direction – not along with the pulse, but

toward its source.

The light thinned, and he looked into someplace new. A dark expanse that was neither the world of the

dead nor the world of the living.

In that other place, he found destruction.

Decay. Not blackness, for blackness was too complete, too whole to represent this thing he sensed in the

Beyond. It was a vast force that would gleefully take something as simple as darkness, then rip it apart.

This force was time infinite. It was the winds that weathered, the storms that broke, the timeless waves

running slowly, slowly, slowly to a stop as the sun and the planet cooled to nothing.

It was the ultimate end and destiny of all things. And it was angry.

Kelsier pulled back, throwing himself up out of the light, gasping, trembling.

He had met God. But for every Push, there was a Pull. What was the opposite of God?

What he had seen troubled him so much that he almost didn’t return. He almost convinced himself to

ignore the terrible thing in the darkness. He nearly blocked out the whispers and tried to pretend he had

never seen that awesome, vast destroyer.

But of course he couldn’t do that. Kelsier had never been able to resist a secret. This thing, even more

than meeting Fuzz, proved that Kelsier had been playing all along at a game whose rules far outmatched

his understanding.

That both terrified and excited him.

And so, he returned to gaze upon the thing. Again and again he went, struggling to comprehend, though

he felt like an ant trying to understand a symphony.

He did this for weeks, right up until the point when the thing looked at him.

Before, it hadn’t seemed to notice – as one might not notice the spider hiding inside a keyhole. This time

though, Kelsier somehow alerted it. The thing churned in an abrupt change of motion, then flowed toward

Kelsier, its essence surrounding the place from which Kelsier observed. It rotated slowly about itself in a

vortex – like an ocean that began turning around one spot. Kelsier couldn’t help but feel that an infinite,

vast eye was suddenly squinting at him.

He fled, splashing, kicking up the liquid light as he backed away into his prison. He was so alarmed that

he felt a phantom heartbeat thrumming inside of him, his essence acknowledging the proper reaction to

shock and trying to replicate it. That stilled as he settled into his customary seat at the side of the pool.

The sight of that thing turning its attention upon him, the sensation of being tiny in the face of something

so vast, deeply troubled Kelsier. For all his confidence and plotting, he was basically nothing. His entire

life had been an exercise in unintentional bravado.

Months passed. He didn’t return to study the thing Beyond; Kelsier instead waited for Fuzz to visit and

check in on him, as he did periodically.

When Fuzz finally arrived, he looked even more unraveled than the last time, mists escaping from his

shoulders, a small hole in his left cheek exposing a view into his mouth, his clothing growing ragged.

“Fuzz?” Kelsier asked. “I saw something. This… Ruin you spoke of. I think I can watch it.”

Fuzz just paced back and forth, not even speaking.

“Fuzz? Hey, are you listening?”

Nothing.

“Idiot,” Kelsier tried. “Hey, you’re a disgrace to deityhood. Are you paying attention?”

Even an insult didn’t work. Fuzz just kept pacing.