Mistborn/ Stormlight Archive oddities (spoilers for SA and Mistborn)

[theofficetroll he/him]

I was doing a reread of Final Empire and found myself surprised at Milev's death.

 

Milev was described as having had his eyes cut out. The explanation the crew gave was that it was part of torturing him, which honestly seems pretty weak. There are a lot better ways to torture someone than removing their eyes.

 

It's possible that there was an attempt at making him a Steel Inquisitor (especially given the amount of blood), but I doubt it. They don't make just any random person a Steel Inquisitor. He might be useful in tracking down Vin, giving him some of the Spikes to make him a good bloodhound to track her down (or the rest of the crew, since he met them), but it doesn't quite seem their style.

 

What struck me immediately was how similar it was to Liss, the assassin on Roshar who gouged the eyes out of her victims to hide the fact that she used a shardblade.

 

It seems unlikely that a shardblade would make its way to Scadrial, but I see no reason it couldn't happen.

 

No real conclusion here, just an oddity I noticed and I am loathe to believe that anything in the books is purely coincidental :-P

[king of nowhere]

So, you are arguing that it's unlikely that torturers would gouge the eyes out of someone.

You are proposing instead that a worldhopper with a shardblade killed him - a random thief crewleader who just had passing contact with the main characters but knew next to nothing about them - and then gouged his eyes out to cover the source of the killing - despite the fact that no one would know the work of a shardblade on scadrial, and no one would care to make inquiries for a skaa crewleader.

 

No, I see the first option as the less unlikely of the two, by a fair bit.

also, ripping eyes is a good torturing technique, if you don't  have much time for it. if you can devote weeks to breaking a prisoner, you favor techniques that gives no permanent damage. but if you can only spare a few hours at most, you do your worst and hope he'll break immediately. and he probably did; he knew he was going to die anyway, and he had no reason to withhold any information; it's not like he cared about another thieving crew.

[Lightsworn Panda he/him]

I think the worldhopper scenario is actually possible. Maybe a worldhopper (it doesn't have to be Liss, but she is a possible candidate) was caught red-handed while doing worldhopperish deeds by Milev, causing the worldhopper to panic and stick Milev with a convenient Shardblade. Fearing retribution from the 17th Shard, the worldhopper probably gouged out Milev's eyes to hide the evidence, and framed the deed on the Steel Inquisitors, who wouldn't really mind the blame, since it'd certainly increase they're reputation.

 

Of course, Milev's eyes was most likely gouged out by the Inquisitors. Losing a certain important organ, as pointed out by king of nowhere, can break a victim quite quickly. Getting tortured to death by a cult of slightly disturbed priests is also much more likely than being killed by a worldhopper.

[Edgedancer he/him]

We can be fairly certain that 1) The Inquisition gouged out his eyes and that 2) TLR had no connection to worldhoppers, so my guess is no, it probably was the Inquisition. They could also have removed his eyes for symbolism/shock factor.

[killersquirrel59 he/him]

While I think it is certainly more likely that this was all done by Inquisitors either as torture or just because they could, I have to say that this seems exactly the kind of unlikely easter egg that Brandon likes to bury. Let us not forget that he had already conceived Stormlight Archive before ever beginning Mistborn, so the presence of a Rosharan element in The Final Empire is quite viable on the development timeline. I'd say this has some potential. Completely unproveable of course, but certainly an interesting idea.

Edited October 4, 2014 by killersquirrel59