Mistborn (Era 1)

By the end of The Final Empire, the thousand-year reign of the Lord Ruler over the Final Empire has been ended. Vin, a former street thief revealed early on to be a rare Mistborn (an Allomancer with access to all metal-based powers), was recruited by the crew of Kelsier, himself a Mistborn and escaped prisoner of the brutal Pits of Hathsin. Kelsier trained Vin and used her, disguised as the noblewoman Valette Renoux, to infiltrate Luthadel's aristocracy, where she fell in love with Elend Venture, heir to House Venture and a nobleman who privately favors more democratic, humane governance.

Kelsier's larger plan was to destabilize Luthadel by provoking a war among the noble houses and smuggling in an army of skaa rebels to seize the city, all as a prelude to striking at the Lord Ruler's economic and political power. The plan went badly wrong in places — most of the recruited soldiers were massacred, and Kelsier's ally Lord Renoux was captured — but Kelsier was killed by the Lord Ruler in a public confrontation that, by design, turned him into a martyr. His death ignited a mass skaa uprising that, combined with the surviving smuggled army, overthrew the city's power structure.

Vin picked up where Kelsier left off, using a mysterious Eleventh Metal he had been investigating. After being captured and tortured by the Canton of Inquisition, she was freed by Sazed, a Terrisman Feruchemist who has become her closest ally and mentor. Marsh, Kelsier's brother, was revealed to have been forcibly turned into a Steel Inquisitor; he turned against his captors before being subdued by the Lord Ruler. Vin then confronted the Lord Ruler directly and discovered the empire's central secret: he is not the true Hero of Ages who saved the world a thousand years ago, but a usurper named Rashek who murdered the real Hero and stole his power, combining Allomancy and Feruchemy (via magical bracelets) to grant himself immortality. Vin stripped him of these bracelets, causing him to age instantly, and killed him. His last words were an unexplained, ominous warning of a coming "great doom."

With the Lord Ruler dead and the Final Empire's central authority destroyed, Luthadel was left in chaos. Elend Venture stepped up to prevent total collapse, working to unite the city under a new government based on the democratic principles he had long favored. As the next book begins, readers should know: Vin and Elend are romantically involved and he is now a political leader in the power vacuum left by the Lord Ruler's death; Sazed and Marsh (transformed but alive) survived and remain significant allies; the true nature of the ancient prophecy of the "Hero of Ages" and the deception behind the Lord Ruler's founding myth is now known to Vin's group but not necessarily the wider world; and the Lord Ruler's final cryptic warning of a coming doom has not been explained, leaving open the question of what larger threat the Lord Ruler's thousand-year rule may have been suppressing or holding at bay.

As Hero of Ages opens, the political map has been reshaped by the end of the siege of Luthadel. Elend Venture has been formally crowned emperor, with Ashweather Cett, Lord Penrod, and Straff Venture's surviving general all having sworn fealty to him as subordinate kings — a fragile new empire built from former rivals. Straff Venture is dead, killed by Vin, and Jastes, the former friend who led the koloss army, was killed by Elend after losing control of his forces. The koloss themselves are now nominally controllable through Allomancy, a power Vin discovered during the battle, and they remain a looming, unstable military asset/threat.

Vin and Elend are now a committed couple, having gotten past the rupture caused by Zane, Elend's half-brother and a rival Mistborn who tried to manipulate Vin into abandoning the city and killing indiscriminately. Zane is dead, killed by Vin with help from TenSoon, a kandra who had secretly replaced Vin's companion OreSeur (the real OreSeur was killed earlier by Zane's people). TenSoon has since departed for the kandra homeland, so Vin no longer has a kandra companion. Elend, previously non-Allomantic, was turned into a Mistborn near the very end of the book when a mist-spirit guided Vin to feed him a metal bead after he was stabbed — he is now a novice Mistborn learning his new powers.

The central discovery of the book is that the legendary Well of Ascension was hidden beneath Luthadel itself all along, moved there by the Lord Ruler after his own ascension centuries before. Vin found it, and — resisting the temptation to seize its power for herself to save Elend or remake the world — she released the power for "the good of the world," per instructions Sazed had prepared for her. The instant she did, an ancient and enormously powerful entity that had been imprisoned within the Well broke free, declaring itself liberated. Its nature and intentions are unknown, but it is clearly a major new threat going forward.

Sazed, the Terris Keeper, spent much of the book researching an ancient prophecy about a "Hero of Ages," coming to believe Vin might be that figure. After the Well's release, he discovered that the ancient text he'd been relying on had been deliberately altered — both in a metal engraving he'd copied and even within his own transcribed metalminds — meaning the entire Hero of Ages prophecy was likely a manipulation designed to trick someone into freeing the entity from the Well. This revelation shattered Sazed's religious faith, leaving him in a state of crisis as the book ends. Meanwhile, Marsh — Kelsier's brother, now a Steel Inquisitor working for the Ministry — briefly attacked Sazed near the Well under some compulsion before escaping again; his true loyalties and fate remain an open question. Vin, Elend, and the surviving crew (including Ham and Spook) now face the task of governing a new empire while an unknown entity, freed from ancient imprisonment, is loose in the world — with the ominous strangeness of the mists (noted throughout the book) still unexplained.

By the end of The Hero of Ages, the millennium-long struggle between the cosmic forces Preservation and Ruin has come to a close, and the Final Empire's world has been utterly transformed. Vin, the Mistborn who once toppled the Lord Ruler, spent the book hunting the Lord Ruler's hidden supply caches with her husband Elend Venture while trying to understand Ruin's growing influence—deadly mists, ash-choked skies, and koloss armies turned into weapons of mass destruction. In the climax, Vin was fatally wounded but freed by the dying Inquisitor Marsh (a former ally turned pawn of Ruin) from a hidden Hemalurgic spike disguised as her earring, and she ascended to become the new vessel of Preservation. She then used that power, combined with an echo of Ruin's own destructive nature within her, to sacrifice herself and permanently destroy Ruin at the climactic battle near the kandra homeland, the Pits of Hathsin.

Elend, who had grown into a capable and beloved king and Allomancer over the course of the trilogy, died in that same final battle, mortally wounded by Marsh, but not before ensuring that his soldiers burned away the vast stash of atium that was secretly Ruin's physical "body," preventing any chance of Ruin's return. Both Vin and Elend are dead at the book's close, their bodies found peacefully lying together in a field of flowers in the newly remade world.

Sazed, the Terris Keeper who spent much of the book in a crisis of faith after the death of his beloved Tindwyl, is revealed as the true Hero of Ages—not Vin, as most had assumed. Using the vast knowledge stored in his feruchemical copperminds along with the combined power of the now-dead Preservation and Ruin, he single-handedly reshapes the devastated, ash-covered world into a lush, colorful paradise. He then vanishes as an active character, leaving behind a comprehensive written account of the true history of Preservation and Ruin and his own transformation.

Other major figures survive and carry forward: Spook (the young former street urchin Lestibournes), who was secretly made into a full Mistborn and physically healed by Sazed as a parting gift, steps up to lead the surviving population in rebuilding society in this new world. Breeze and Ham, longtime members of Kelsier's original crew, also survive and emerge into the reformed world. TenSoon and the kandra, having accepted their prophesied role, are now committed allies of humanity rather than secretive outsiders. Sazed's note to Spook reveals that at least two metals and their Allomantic/Feruchemical alloys remain undiscovered in the world—an open thread going forward. The Final Empire, the Lord Ruler's rule, and the ancient war between Preservation and Ruin are all definitively concluded; the surviving cast now faces the very different challenge of rebuilding civilization from scratch in a transformed, green world with new metallic mysteries still unexplored.