When a researcher returns to Elendel with images of a mythical Lord Ruler artifact, believed to grant wearers his power, Waxillium Ladrian conducts an investigation in the southern city of New Seran, where he makes unsettling discoveries about the true goals of The Set.

Three hundred years after the events of the Mistborn trilogy, Scadrial is on the verge of modernity, with railroads to supplement the canals, electric lighting in the streets and the homes of the wealthy, and the first steel-framed skyscrapers racing for the clouds. Kelsier, Vin, Elend, Sazed, Spook, and the rest are now part of history -- or religion. Yet even as science and technology are reaching new heights, the old magics of Allomancy and Feruchemy...

For a thousand years the ash fell and no flowers bloomed. For a thousand years the Skaa slaved in misery and lived in fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler, the "Sliver of Infinity," reigned with absolute power and ultimate terror, divinely invincible. Then, when hope was so long lost that not even its memory remained, a terribly scarred, heart-broken half-Skaa rediscovered it in the depths of the Lord Rulerś most hellish prison. Kelsier "snapped"...