There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear, has been reduced to slavery. One such war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. Wars are fought for them, and won by them. It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and Shardplate remain: mystical swords and suits of armor that transform ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Widely acclaimed for his work completing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga, Brandon Sanderson now begins a grand cycle of his own, one every bit as ambitious and immersive. These four people are key.Īnd one of them will destroy us. Surgebinding and Shardwielding can return the magics of ancient days can become ours again. The last is the highprince, a warlord whose eyes have opened to the past as his thirst for battle wanes. The third is the liar, a young woman who wears a scholar’s mantle over the heart of a thief. The second is the assassin, a murderer who weeps as he kills. The first is the surgeon, forced to put aside healing to become a soldier in the most brutal war of our time. But ignore the steel long enough, and it will eventually rust away. Or was that victory an illusion all along? Did our enemies realize that the harder they fought, the stronger we resisted? Perhaps they saw that the heat and the hammer only make for a better grade of sword.

Nothing, it appears, is more challenging to the souls of men than victory itself. A time when there was still magic in the world and honor in the hearts of men. The age before the Heralds abandoned us and the Knights Radiant turned against us. I long for the days before the Last Desolation. I want to explain the book.īut, for now, I think it’s best to just show you instead. I want to talk about the art in the book (it’s ambitious, unlike anything I’ve seen tried in an epic fantasy novel before.) I want to talk about the scope of the series, the distinctive world which is so much larger and more real than anything I’ve worked on before. I want to tell you more, but I don’t have the space here. They’ll get their own books later in the series. The Way Of Kings is his story, though he shares the space with several others. My goal: to prove to myself, and to him, that the “good” decision was not actually the best one. The fork that cast him into some of the worst imaginable circumstances, ground him against the stones of a world where there is no soil or sand on the ground. So I started over from scratch and had him take the other fork, the more difficult fork. I wrote the entire book that way before realizing I’d done it wrong. The book started its life many years ago being about a young man who made a good decision. But a great book for me isn’t about a magic, it’s about the people that the magic affects. On one hand, this delights me, as I do put a lot of effort into the magic in my books. The author who creates interesting types of magic for every book he writes. I’ve begun to build a reputation as the “magic system” guy. And so this time, I’m going to try to talk about what The Way Of Kings is. How much the project has come to mean to me over the decades.) But such things describe the book but don’t actually tell you anything. How I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words worth of worldbuilding for it. (How I started work on it over fifteen years ago. I often end up talking about its creation. Kings has stymied me each time I’ve tried to describe it. A boy who finds that librarians secretly rule the world. A man cast down by a terrible, magical disease and forced to rebuild a society among those similarly afflicted. The gang of thieves who want to rob an immortal emperor. Each one was built around one or two central premises. Before, I’ve found it easy to explain my novels. I’ve been asked to introduce The Way Of Kings to you. This post originally appeared on Tor.com.

Thief of hearts dancer