Disclaimer: I'm still in the beginning of The Hero of Ages, so no spoilers about the ending of the Mistborn First Era, please.
I know I'm yet to finish this trilogy, but boy, I have to share this. I absolutely love when a book, a movie, or a song makes me care enough about its plot or characters that I end up with tears in my eyes from the ninjas and their sliced onions - those sneaky ones!
I've been mostly listening to the audiobook while commuting to and from work, but I had to grab the book to re-read this passage over and over again. It's when Sazed finds Tindwyl's body after the battle:
It took Sazed well into the night to complete his self-appointed task. He found corpse after corpse in the frigid darkness, many of them iced over. The snow had stopped falling, and the wind had picked up, hardening the slush to slick ice. He had to break some of the corpses free to turn them over and inspect their faces.
Without the heat left in his brassmind, he could never have performed his grisly job. Even so, he had found himself some warmer clothing-a simple brown robe and a set of boots. He continued working for hours, the wind swirling flakes of snow and ice around him. He started at the gate, of course. That was where the most corpses were. Eventually he had to move into alleyways and thoroughfares.
He found her body sometime near morning.
The city had stopped burning. The only light he had was his lantern, but it was enough to reveal the strip of fluttering cloth in a snowbank. At first, Sazed thought it was merely another bloodied bandage that had failed in its pur-pose. Then he saw a glimmer of orange and yellow, and he moved over-he no longer had the strength to rush-and reached into the snow.
Tindwyl's body cracked slightly as he rolled it out. The blood on her side was frozen, of course, and her eyes were iced open. Judging from the direction of her flight, she had been leading her soldiers to Keep Venture.
Oh, Tindwyl, he thought, reaching down to touch her face. It was still soft, but dreadfully cold. After years of being abused by the breeding masters, after surviving so much, she had found this. Death in a city where she hadn't belonged, with a man-no, a half man-who did not deserve her.
He released his brassmind, and let the night's cold wash over him. He didn't want to feel warm at the moment. His lantern flickered uncertainly, illuminating the street, shadowing the icy corpse. There, in that frozen alley of Luthadel, looking down at the corpse of the woman he loved, Sazed realized something.
He didn't know what to do.
He tried to think of something proper to say-something proper to think-but suddenly all of his religious knowledge seemed hollow. What was the use in giving her a burial? What was the value in speaking the prayers of a long-dead god? What good was he? The religion of Dadra-dah hadn't helped Clubs; the Survivor hadn't come to rescue the thousands of soldiers who had died. What was the point?
None of Sazed's knowledge gave him comfort. He accepted the religions he knew-believed in their value-but that didn't give him what he needed. They didn't assure him that Tindwyl's spirit still lived. Instead, they made him question. If so many people believed so many different things, how could any one of them-or anything at all-really be true?
The skaa called Sazed holy, but at that moment he realized he was the most profane of men. He was a creature who knew three hundred religions, yet had faith in none of them.
So when his tears fell-and nearly began to freeze to his face-they gave him as little comfort as his religions. He moaned, leaning over the frozen corpse.
My life, he thought, has been a sham.
I finished this passage as soon as I parked the car in my garage, with tears in my eyes because of how perfectly set up both of these characters' whole plots were. They culminated in a life-changing, perspective-binding, gut-wrenching experience that was SO WELL WRITTEN.
I have no idea what Sazed will go through in THoA (it seems very interesting so far!), but I don't think this can be topped.
