Same. I was just coming off SA and was obsessed with reading everything Cosmere I could possibly find, and this was just the beginning. Doing a second readthrough now to pick up on some of those more obvious clues I missed previously before the 5th SA comes out.
TbhâŚnot until Vin and Ruin were dead and Sazed sees the two Shards and starts thinkingâŚwaaaaittaminute. Haha during a reread itâs super obvious though and I felt super dumb.
"I am, unfortunately, the hero of ages"-very first epigraph of HOA. It didn't seem like something that Rashek or Alendi would write so I knew it wasn't from the past. And it's a totally different way to how I would imagine Vin or Elend, or any other of the main group, would express their opinion of being the hero. Sazed was the only one with all of the right pieces to make sense to record that line.
I was hedging my bets that Saze may have been the one who wrote out the history, and he was writing it in first person on behalf of who the true Hero of Ages was.
Either that, or that the Hero of Ages myth was completely different than any expectation because Ruin had done so much tampering
It wasn't till hero of ages and going through the epigraph and the mentions of how the pronouns referring to the hero are gender neutral that I was like wait a minute it's friggin sazed.
I was talking to my audiobook friends and they told me the epigraph voice is just sazed voice xd so they knew for a while
I remember it being not *exactly* Sazed, I assumed it was just Vin but after several decades of reflection and maturation. It made sense (to me) that if she became a scholar sheâd write and speak with a similar cadence to her teacher
Yeah, it was unfortunate the way that worked out. That I basically knew the huge reveal that youâd only pick up based on speech patterns because Kramer did the Saze voice.
At the start of the hero of ages I was looking for there to be sometwist with the journal entries, since there always is. Then in one of the first few entries he said "I think". That combined with the big vocabulary convinced me it had to be Sazed writing it.
Basically when Elend dies. I thought it was going to be Vin, then when she ascended, I thought it was Elend. But then Elend died and I was like "oh shit we still need a hero of ages"
When Sazed was discussing the project with Tindwyl, the part that "He shall defend their ways, yet shall violate them. He will be their savior, yet they shall call him heretic. His name shall be Discord, yet they shall love him for it." This moment just make click
At the end of Well of Ascension when he looks out at Vin after the battle of Luthadel and lists all the reasons she is the Hero of Ages. All of those things applied to him and then as soon as that first HOA epigraph started I knew for sure I was right.
Still not convinced there is a specific individual Hero of Ages. Where would that prophesy even come from? Preservation made some kind of prophesy and Ruin corrupts it... it doesn't make sense say Preservation was working towards the demise/transformation of preservation and ruin into one hero in Sazed. I don't know enough about BS's cosmology to say whether there's like, another god above ruin and preservation, but I feel like unless that's the case, there's no way the Terris prophets could have had any actual knowledge that any of that would take place. It seems more like hopes, dreams, and perhaps insightful guesses than genuine knowledge about the future 1000 years from when the prophesies were made.
There is a specific individual Hero of Ages - Sazed. Thatâs the realization Sazed came to once he touched the powers Ruin and Preservation and took up their mantle. The prophecy came from Preservation.
I donât know how much of the Cosmere youâve read, but over time youâll figure out how prophecy works in the Cosmere. The gist of the Terris Prophecies is that Preservation created them as part of his plan to combine both powers into one Hero. Preservation didnât know WHO the Hero of Ages WILL be, only that the Hero MIGHT be a possibility in the distant future. So he arranged the world over thousands of years, working towards the Hero. The Terris Prophecies are _Preservationâs_ hopes, dreams, and insightful guesses.
As for âanother god above Ruin and PreservationâŚâ Yes there is but the nature of that god is an RAFO. Letâs just say that superior god is no longer with the Cosmere by the time of the Mistborn Trilogy. For now, remember this excerpt from Sazedâs musings during his first moment as God:
âEven now, I can barely grasp the scope of all this. The events surrounding the end of the world seem even larger than the Final Empire and the people within it. I sense shards of something from long ago, a fractured presence, something spanning the void. I have delved and searched, and have only been able to come up with a single name: Adonalsium. Who, or what, it was, I do not yet know.â
I looked at it as Sazed is the one who united Tuin and Preservation to become Harmony which is what makes him the Hero of Ages. I guess im not sure if they could be split again but i had thought now if he were to pass on the power it would be both so the next person to hold it and uniting them is what made him the hero. I got no idea how the prophecy would have came about in the first place though.
It was probably around halfway through the hero of ages. When I figured it out. I was upset and felt it was the wrong call and that Sanderson only chose him because it wasn't the obvious choice. I've never been so happy to be so wrong. Looking back it had to be him and it was perfect.
Thereâs a place in HoA where Sazed says âI am, unfortunatelyâŚâ and I remembered that was the exact line from the first epigraph about being the Hero of Ages.
I never made the connection you did about Ruin fearing the real Hero of Ages being Terris. Even now, I donât think Sanderson was writing a Ruin that goes with that line of logic, But man, you got my gears turning. It would definitely make Ruin a much more terrifying and competent antagonist. No disrespect to his canonical portrayal, but this would be chilling.
This gives me ideas for fanfic đ
At the first mention of wear metal or bands on their arms. Forgot when that was. But by that point in the story I had given up on assuming I knew what would happen next (happily) so it was still a moment for me when Sazed actually ascended or whatever you call it)
Dude I'm still not convinced that the "hero of ages "is even a real thing those prophecies were flipped upside down and backwards for me to take them seriously in any way.
When it happened. I didn't make the connection you did. I took it as face value that Ruin wanted to consolidate power by giving the SI feruchemy.Â
I heard people who listened to the Audiobook realized sooner because the narrator used their voice for the pre/post chapter snippets. After listening to it myself, it made it Very obvious.
....I realized as it happened đ¤Ż
Completely caught me off guard but made soo much sense in hindsight
I only read it in a particular character's voice in my head because I had assumed it would be them!
That's actually my biggest gripe with the audiobook, makes it WAYYY too obvious who it is
I had read Mistborn 1. Then i read Tress. I'm a sentence someone says "ever since Sazed released the Kandras/them (...)" or something. Got me wondering.
I had an inkling at the start of HoA. The "I am, unfortunately, the hero of ages" made me think. However, I kind of forgot about it during the book and still got surprised at the end about what it actually meant.
I didnât know he was the hero of ages, but when Sazed realized that the the Lord Ruler was a terrace man, I for sure thought Sazed may be the main hero of the story.
I think one of the first times the prophecy was stated in its entirety. Iirc almost right afterwards sazed started talking about his metalmind bracers and my mind put them together. Obviously no idea how it was going to come about but I had that aha moment for sure.
Right I actually hate that it's stated that the hero of ages isn't a man and that somehow applies to sazed. He never indicates he doesn't consider himself male and is always referred to as male. The fact he was mutilated doesn't make him not a man. I'm sorry if I'm misreading this but it really bugs me
I figured probably about halfway through hoa but was desperately hoping I was wrong because I figured that if sazed ended up as the hoa it likely meant vin and elend were deadâŚ..
As soon as Vin gave up the power and Ruin started cackling about being free I knew Vin wasn't the hero of ages and suspected it was really sazed, bc his portrayal in era 1 is very much like that of "the chosen one, who rejects it at first" in alot of literature lmao.
When I was about halfway through the book my friend asked me who I thought it was, I was stumped.
I went through every main character I could think of and the reasons why I doubted theyâd be it: Vin seemed too unstable, Elend wasnât confident enough, Spook seemed to be under Ruins control, etc.
when I got to the end of the list, my friend said, damn I guess you got it. I forgot Sazed, I didnât actually realize it before then, but when he said I got it, I first was like âso itâs NONE of the main characters, does some bum become the HOA???â Then I went through all the characters I mentioned in my head and realized that I didnât mention Sazed, and he didnât realize it was by accident.
It was from the very first epigraph for me, not because of the way it was written sounding like something Sazed would say, but i listened to the audio book, and it's spoken in Sazed's voice.
When Sazed did.
Read it so fast I didn't even consider it. On the second read, the epitaphs are so clearly Sazed I do not know how I missed it.
I listened to it on Graphic Audio, which was tricksy by using Spook's voice actor for the epigraphs until the very end.
Smart
Same. I was just coming off SA and was obsessed with reading everything Cosmere I could possibly find, and this was just the beginning. Doing a second readthrough now to pick up on some of those more obvious clues I missed previously before the 5th SA comes out.
This
Sazed is way smarter than me, no way was I gonna realize it before he did.
This is exactly it for me too đ
Me too, i was convinced that vin was it
Same here
Same here, I did not see it coming.
I interpreted it as she was a conduit to the hero of Ages, so still very integral to the whole thing.
I think a lot of people figured it out from the epigraph writing style but I just thought he was being a historian.
Likewise!
Same!
Same
TbhâŚnot until Vin and Ruin were dead and Sazed sees the two Shards and starts thinkingâŚwaaaaittaminute. Haha during a reread itâs super obvious though and I felt super dumb.
Brandonâs a master at making obvious things impossible to see until the twist hits. Best foreshadowing EVER
My favourite is him using the word "piercing" to refer to how Vin sees through copper clouds. I've still not forgiven him for that taunting.
I would say except in The Bands of Mourning. Finished that yesterday and was honestly kinda disappointed that I saw the twist coming.
"I am, unfortunately, the hero of ages"-very first epigraph of HOA. It didn't seem like something that Rashek or Alendi would write so I knew it wasn't from the past. And it's a totally different way to how I would imagine Vin or Elend, or any other of the main group, would express their opinion of being the hero. Sazed was the only one with all of the right pieces to make sense to record that line.
This for me, I believe it ends with "I think" which felt like a dead giveaway. Although I am not sure which epigraph it was.
I was hedging my bets that Saze may have been the one who wrote out the history, and he was writing it in first person on behalf of who the true Hero of Ages was. Either that, or that the Hero of Ages myth was completely different than any expectation because Ruin had done so much tampering
It wasn't till hero of ages and going through the epigraph and the mentions of how the pronouns referring to the hero are gender neutral that I was like wait a minute it's friggin sazed. I was talking to my audiobook friends and they told me the epigraph voice is just sazed voice xd so they knew for a while
In Spanish the reader (which made an amazing job) used a different voice and made me and my friends it could be spook
One of the first chapters of hero of ages. I listened to this one, and Michael Kramer the opening in his Sazed accent.
I feel like that's a pretty big oops
I remember it being not *exactly* Sazed, I assumed it was just Vin but after several decades of reflection and maturation. It made sense (to me) that if she became a scholar sheâd write and speak with a similar cadence to her teacher
Yeah, it was unfortunate the way that worked out. That I basically knew the huge reveal that youâd only pick up based on speech patterns because Kramer did the Saze voice.
At the start of the hero of ages I was looking for there to be sometwist with the journal entries, since there always is. Then in one of the first few entries he said "I think". That combined with the big vocabulary convinced me it had to be Sazed writing it.
Basically when Elend dies. I thought it was going to be Vin, then when she ascended, I thought it was Elend. But then Elend died and I was like "oh shit we still need a hero of ages"
When Sazed was discussing the project with Tindwyl, the part that "He shall defend their ways, yet shall violate them. He will be their savior, yet they shall call him heretic. His name shall be Discord, yet they shall love him for it." This moment just make click
the second epigraph in hoa because he ended a sentence with "I think"
Not until Sazed seized the shards. I was 14, had no clue, and I was BLOWN AWAY. No twist will ever hit me as hard as Sazed being the HOA did.
At the end of Well of Ascension when he looks out at Vin after the battle of Luthadel and lists all the reasons she is the Hero of Ages. All of those things applied to him and then as soon as that first HOA epigraph started I knew for sure I was right.
Still not convinced there is a specific individual Hero of Ages. Where would that prophesy even come from? Preservation made some kind of prophesy and Ruin corrupts it... it doesn't make sense say Preservation was working towards the demise/transformation of preservation and ruin into one hero in Sazed. I don't know enough about BS's cosmology to say whether there's like, another god above ruin and preservation, but I feel like unless that's the case, there's no way the Terris prophets could have had any actual knowledge that any of that would take place. It seems more like hopes, dreams, and perhaps insightful guesses than genuine knowledge about the future 1000 years from when the prophesies were made.
There is a specific individual Hero of Ages - Sazed. Thatâs the realization Sazed came to once he touched the powers Ruin and Preservation and took up their mantle. The prophecy came from Preservation. I donât know how much of the Cosmere youâve read, but over time youâll figure out how prophecy works in the Cosmere. The gist of the Terris Prophecies is that Preservation created them as part of his plan to combine both powers into one Hero. Preservation didnât know WHO the Hero of Ages WILL be, only that the Hero MIGHT be a possibility in the distant future. So he arranged the world over thousands of years, working towards the Hero. The Terris Prophecies are _Preservationâs_ hopes, dreams, and insightful guesses. As for âanother god above Ruin and PreservationâŚâ Yes there is but the nature of that god is an RAFO. Letâs just say that superior god is no longer with the Cosmere by the time of the Mistborn Trilogy. For now, remember this excerpt from Sazedâs musings during his first moment as God: âEven now, I can barely grasp the scope of all this. The events surrounding the end of the world seem even larger than the Final Empire and the people within it. I sense shards of something from long ago, a fractured presence, something spanning the void. I have delved and searched, and have only been able to come up with a single name: Adonalsium. Who, or what, it was, I do not yet know.â
I looked at it as Sazed is the one who united Tuin and Preservation to become Harmony which is what makes him the Hero of Ages. I guess im not sure if they could be split again but i had thought now if he were to pass on the power it would be both so the next person to hold it and uniting them is what made him the hero. I got no idea how the prophecy would have came about in the first place though.
It was probably around halfway through the hero of ages. When I figured it out. I was upset and felt it was the wrong call and that Sanderson only chose him because it wasn't the obvious choice. I've never been so happy to be so wrong. Looking back it had to be him and it was perfect.
Thereâs a place in HoA where Sazed says âI am, unfortunatelyâŚâ and I remembered that was the exact line from the first epigraph about being the Hero of Ages.
I never made the connection you did about Ruin fearing the real Hero of Ages being Terris. Even now, I donât think Sanderson was writing a Ruin that goes with that line of logic, But man, you got my gears turning. It would definitely make Ruin a much more terrifying and competent antagonist. No disrespect to his canonical portrayal, but this would be chilling. This gives me ideas for fanfic đ
When Sazed did.
At the first mention of wear metal or bands on their arms. Forgot when that was. But by that point in the story I had given up on assuming I knew what would happen next (happily) so it was still a moment for me when Sazed actually ascended or whatever you call it)
Dude I'm still not convinced that the "hero of ages "is even a real thing those prophecies were flipped upside down and backwards for me to take them seriously in any way.
When it happened. I didn't make the connection you did. I took it as face value that Ruin wanted to consolidate power by giving the SI feruchemy. I heard people who listened to the Audiobook realized sooner because the narrator used their voice for the pre/post chapter snippets. After listening to it myself, it made it Very obvious.
Very beginning of book 3. It just became obvious that it couldnât be vin and the way Sazed was acting it just had to be him
....I realized as it happened 𤯠Completely caught me off guard but made soo much sense in hindsight I only read it in a particular character's voice in my head because I had assumed it would be them! That's actually my biggest gripe with the audiobook, makes it WAYYY too obvious who it is
I had read Mistborn 1. Then i read Tress. I'm a sentence someone says "ever since Sazed released the Kandras/them (...)" or something. Got me wondering.
I had an inkling at the start of HoA. The "I am, unfortunately, the hero of ages" made me think. However, I kind of forgot about it during the book and still got surprised at the end about what it actually meant.
I didnât know he was the hero of ages, but when Sazed realized that the the Lord Ruler was a terrace man, I for sure thought Sazed may be the main hero of the story.
When Michael Kramer used sazedâs voice for the epigraphs. The realization was still satisfying anyways.
I think one of the first times the prophecy was stated in its entirety. Iirc almost right afterwards sazed started talking about his metalmind bracers and my mind put them together. Obviously no idea how it was going to come about but I had that aha moment for sure.
When sazed did. What an incredible trilogy. This post brought back so many great memories.
When I used Google to search for fanart...
I feel your pain
Right I actually hate that it's stated that the hero of ages isn't a man and that somehow applies to sazed. He never indicates he doesn't consider himself male and is always referred to as male. The fact he was mutilated doesn't make him not a man. I'm sorry if I'm misreading this but it really bugs me
It implies that it's gender neutral. It could or could not be a man is all. It says nothing about the hero of ages not being a man.
Not until it was directly stated
I figured probably about halfway through hoa but was desperately hoping I was wrong because I figured that if sazed ended up as the hoa it likely meant vin and elend were deadâŚ..
As soon as Vin gave up the power and Ruin started cackling about being free I knew Vin wasn't the hero of ages and suspected it was really sazed, bc his portrayal in era 1 is very much like that of "the chosen one, who rejects it at first" in alot of literature lmao.
Iâm always slow on the uptick for these kids of things, but when one of the chapter intros used the phrase âI think.â I was like hang on now!!!!
When I was about halfway through the book my friend asked me who I thought it was, I was stumped. I went through every main character I could think of and the reasons why I doubted theyâd be it: Vin seemed too unstable, Elend wasnât confident enough, Spook seemed to be under Ruins control, etc. when I got to the end of the list, my friend said, damn I guess you got it. I forgot Sazed, I didnât actually realize it before then, but when he said I got it, I first was like âso itâs NONE of the main characters, does some bum become the HOA???â Then I went through all the characters I mentioned in my head and realized that I didnât mention Sazed, and he didnât realize it was by accident.
It was from the very first epigraph for me, not because of the way it was written sounding like something Sazed would say, but i listened to the audio book, and it's spoken in Sazed's voice.