Brandon Sanderson - [Stormlight Archive 01]
Page 1
the
WAY of
KINGS
P R I M E
T H E 2 0 0 2 A L T E R N A T E V E R S I O N
FICTION BY BRANDON SANDERSON®
THE STORMLIGHT ARCHIVE®
The Way of Kings
Words of Radiance
Oathbringer
THE MISTBORN® SAGA
THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY
Mistborn: The Final Empire
The Well of Ascension
The Hero of Ages
THE WAX & WAYNE SERIES
The Alloy of Law
Shadows of Self
The Bands of Mourning
THE RECKONERS®
Steelheart
Firefight
Calamity
SKY WARD
Skyward
Starsight
ALCATRAZ VS. THE EVIL LIBRARIANS
Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians
The Scrivener’s Bones
The Knights of Crystallia
The Shattered Lens
The Dark Talent
NOVELS
Elantris
Warbreaker
The Rithmatist
NOVELET TES
Firstborn
Defending Elysium
Mitosis: A Reckoners Story
NOVELLAS
Perfect State
Snapshot
Children of the Nameless
INFINIT Y BLADE
Infinity Blade: Awakening
Infinity Blade: Redemption
COLLECTIONS
Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere® Col ection
Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds
GRAPHIC NOVELS
White Sand, Volumes 1–3
Dark One
THE WHEEL OF TIME, with Robert Jordan
The Gathering Storm
Towers of Midnight
A Memory of Light
SANDERSON CURIOSITIES
The Way of Kings Prime
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
the way of Kings Prime
Copyright © 2020 by Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC
All rights reserved.
A Dragonsteel Entertainment Book
Published by Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC
American Fork, UT
brandonsanderson.com
Brandon Sanderson®, The Stormlight Archive®, Mistborn®, Cosmere®, Reckoners®, Dragonsteel Entertainment®, and the logo are registered trademarks of
Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC
ISBN 978-1-938570-24-7
First Dragonsteel Edition: December 2020
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
S a n d e r s o n C ur io s it i e s
the
WAY of
KINGS
P R I M E
T H E 2 0 0 2 A L T E R N A T E V E R S I O N
BRANDON SANDERSON
®
A D r a g o n s t e e l E n t e r t a i n m e n t® B o o k
INTRODUCTION
This book is both one of my greatest accomplishments and one of
my greatest failures.
I started it during a difficult time in my life. I’d graduated with my
undergraduate degree in English in 2000, but had been summarily rejected
from every graduate program to which I’d applied. (The book Elantris was my writing sample for those submissions.) The publishing industry didn’t
want my books either; I’d been racking up a nice stack of rejections saying my books were too long.
On top of it all, I’d just finished writing what I consider two of the weakest books of my career. (Though later on the ideas from these unpublished
books evolved into Mistborn.)
And this was when I decided to begin the most ambitious story I’d ever
attempted.
I’ve talked a lot about that time in my life; you might have heard the
story before. I started The Way of Kings because I needed something for me.
Something to prove to myself that I still loved writing. After spending
several years chasing the market by trying to write like popular writers
who were selling at the time, I asked myself, “What would I most want to
read? What would I be writing if I didn’t care what the publishing industry thought?”
The book you are now reading is the result. I was told my books were too
viii PREFACE
long; this is even longer than any book I’d heretofore created. Publishers told me to focus less on magic and more on creating gritty Earth-like settings, like what was selling at the time. I went off in a completely different direction, into a land of knights in magical power armor, ancient magics,
and an ecology that was far, far removed from anything you’d find on Earth.
To an extent this was me giving up, but in the most glorious way possible.
I had realized, during those dark moments, that I loved writing so much
that I wasn’t going to give up, even if I was never published. The Way of Kings was for me. It was my exploration of my own goals for the fantasy genre—my feelings of where it could go, what it could do—and what I’d
like to see fantasy become.
I’ve talked about something my friends jokingly called “worldbuilder’s
disease.” That’s the affliction a writer can get where they spend all their time worldbuilding, and never actually tell their story. For The Way of Kings, I decided to GIVE myself worldbuilder’s disease. I let myself just think
and plan about the world for months and months before writing—far more
than I normally did.
At the time, I was working the graveyard shift at a hotel and would
write during downtime. I bought a three-ring binder, and I started printing off pages of Roshar’s worldbuilding each day after I finished. I filled that thing up with some three or four hundred thousand words of ideas for the
setting—more words than the book itself eventually had. In part, this was
to give myself time to deal with all the rejections I’d been getting.
Things eventually got better. I finally got accepted to a graduate school.
(BYU let me in; I hadn’t wanted to apply there initially because that’s where I’d done my undergraduate studies. However, out of twelve applications the first year and another eight the next year, it’s the only school that accepted me.) I started to see some small successes in publishing. And right around the time I finished The Way of Kings Prime, I finally sold a book.
The Way of Kings saw me through it all. It shepherded me through my transition from an amateur to a professional writer—and the text, as you’ll soon find out, shows that. This book is a failure, but a spectacular one.
I’d never attempted something on this scope before, and so I tried to
write too many different viewpoints, with too many different plotlines for me to juggle. The end result, as you’ll read, is a book that lacks focus—it’s trying to do too much. What it envisions is awesome, but because of my
limited skill at the time, I ended up with a large number of fragments of
different stories told together in one book—rather than something that
tells a single narrative.
THE WAY OF KINGS PRIME
ix
Everything is going to feel just a little off to you in t
his novel. Indeed, themes like mental health, which I later learned better ways of addressing, are . . . handled less delicately in this book. Also, in reading history, I found that many arranged marriages happened between people of extremely
disparate ages, and I wanted to explore that kind of strange relationship. (I did it in a way that didn’t involve anything uncomfortable happening—but
it still came off poorly in the book. Fair warning.)
Almost all the characters are here, though most of them have different
names. (Jasnah and Dalinar are the only names I remember keeping. And
I don’t believe Navani exists yet.) Kaladin, called Merin in this, has a
completely different arc—as I hadn’t put Bridge Four into the book yet,
and hadn’t yet figured out how to make spren part of the world as I wanted.
Taln, the Herald, is a main character—I envisioned him as the main
character of the series back then, though his arc was supposed to be un-
certain, as I didn’t want you to know if he’s actually what he claims, or if he’s delusional.
The events of this book are far, far different from the published version.
So please don’t assume anything in here is still canon, or an indication of the future for the real Stormlight Archive—even the name of the series
was different; I was calling it the Dawnshards. All that said, I’m very proud of this novel. It’s the book I wrote right before Mistborn, and is of a similar quality—just less controlled.
It taught me a great deal, however, and I still think it’s worth reading—so long as you understand that the book is an embryonic version of the story I truly dreamed of telling. I would eventually gain the skill and confidence, after years of thinking about what went wrong, to write the book a better
way. If for some reason you haven’t read the published version, please read that one first.
Despite all its flaws, it’s exactly what I needed when I wrote it. And it
is the seed that eventually grew into something great. I hope you find
something in it to love.
Brandon Sanderson
April 2020
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Even though The Way of Kings Prime was never published in the traditional way, it still had a large group of people —friends, family, members of writing groups—who read it and gave feedback. Even by the time Elantris was published, the binders with the printed pages of the book you now
hold in your hands were still being shared around. (In fact, one of those
binders full of comment-filled pages was literally used as a doorstop when helping a friend move apartments.) So, thank you to everyone who read,
commented upon, and enjoyed this book throughout the years.
For this Sanderson Curiosities edition, big thanks go to Peter Ahlstrom
and Is∞c Stewart for shepherding it from manuscript to print. Kristina
Kugler provided exceptional proofreading and copyediting, for which we
are very grateful. We especial y want to thank Kristy S. Gilbert at Looseleaf Editorial & Production for the book’s layout and design. Her talents and hard work can be seen on every page. Additionally, Isaac Stewart would
like to thank Brandon Sanderson for creating the map and symbols that
appear on the next few pages.
THE DOUBLE EYE
This is a representation of the Double Eye as it appears in Rosharan
art. Sometimes it appears stylized or without glyphs, as seen on the next
page. Other times the Ten Forces are left out in favor of portraying the Ten Essences more prominently.
Part 1
chapter 1
DALENAR 1
Dalenar could see a highstorm approaching. Its clouds crested the
horizon like a rising wave, dark, silent. It was stil distant, but it would come. Furious and exact, highstorms were as inevitable as the rising sun.
The wood lurched beneath his feet, and Dalenar reached reflexively for
the tower’s rail. The battlefield stretched below him, a world of screaming men, metallic rings, and hissing bowstrings.
“When we return,” Elhokar muttered from a short distance away,
“remind me to find a towermaster who doesn’t see fit to run over every
boulder on the battlefield.”
Dalenar snorted quietly, scanning the battlefield. Spearmen in Alethkar
blue held in a tight formation around the advancing tower, protecting the
wooden structure and using its momentum to help push them forward
as they pressed against the enemy line. Two massive chulls pulled the
tower, a fifty-foot high construction of wood and steel. The chul s lumbered forward on trunk-like feet, encased in stone—the great northern beasts
used massive, hollowed-out boulders like shells to hide their tender bodies.
They didn’t even seem to notice their harnesses at their necks or the men
scurrying at their feet.
The tower did its job well. Its two tiers of archers launched volley after volley of missiles at the enemy. Dalenar looked down at the soldiers, wondering what it would be like to be a simple footman facing the enormous
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BRAND ON SANDERS ON
structure. The unfortunate men were forced to choose between holding
their shields up high to block the death from above, or holding them low
to block the spears in front of them. The discarded bodies, left in heaps
behind the advancing line, proved that both choices were equally fatal.
“Where is he?” Elhokar said, frowning. The king shone in his golden
armor, one of the finest suits of Shardplate in Alethkar. Gold-trimmed
with sunbursts on the shoulders and breastplate, the armor was topped by
a helm mounted with four intricate spikes. Yet, majestic though it was, the armor looked wrong on the young king. Dalenar still expected a different
face to look out from that helm—a face aged with wisdom, not young and
untested.
“He’ll come, your majesty,” Meridas promised with a smooth voice.
Dalenar frowned, but said nothing. The king had a right to choose his
counselors, and while Meridas was lowly of rank, he was still a lord—and
a wealthy one. Without Meridas’ s merchant fleets, the king could never
have moved across the Sea of Chomar in such a short time.
Elhokar didn’t respond. His eyes watched the battlefield, yet Dalenar
knew he wasn’t planning strategy. Elhokar only desired one thing from
this battle.
And that, unfortunately, left Dalenar to shoulder the bulk of the com-
mand. Dalenar turned, waving toward the back of the tower and its small
crowd of aides, messengers, and lesser lords—Dalenar’s two living sons
among them. A messenger approached, and Dalenar ordered a squad of
heavy infantry to the eastern flank, to break a particularly resilient group of Prallan spearmen. The messenger nodded, moving to climb down and
deliver the message.
“Where is he?” the king repeated quietly.
Dalenar moved up to stand beside the young king, his armored feet
thumping against the wood. Dalenar’s own Shardplate wasn’t as intricate
as that of his nephew—he hadn’t sewn it with silks, and it bore few
adornments. It suited him, and he had worn it with pride since the day his brother had given it to him, so many years ago.
“The Traitor will commit himself soon,” Dalenar said with a slow nod,
speaking over the sounds of fighting a short distance below. “Your sister’s strategy is a good one. The Prallan forces are buckling in the east, and their men fight with the frantic motions of a group demoralized. If the Traitor
doesn’t
join the battle soon, he will lose the day for certain.”
Elhokar waved a golden hand. “This day was won hours ago.”
“Don’t express the fall, your majesty,” Dalenar warned. “Our force is
THE WAY OF KINGS PRIME 5
larger, but the Prallans fight on the land of their fathers. Arrogance will serve us nothing but misery.”
Again, Elhokar did not respond. He had a regal face, with a perfect
Aleth countenance—dark black hair, oval face, and a distinct chin. In fact, he had more of a traditional noble look than his father had—Nolhonarin’s
face had been flatter, his nose wide and blunt. Yet Nolhonarin had been a
commander like Alethkar had rarely known.
Dalenar sighed to himself, turning back to the battlefield. What had
happened to him? What had happened to the days when he could mourn
a man’s falling one day, then drink to his victories the next? Why did he
keep looking for the features of the father in the face of the son, and since when did he wonder what it felt like to be a footman in the enemy’s army?
His body felt old, lethargic despite the mystical strength and speed of his Shardplate. There had been a day when he’d sworn by the Tenth Name of
the Almighty that he would die with Shardblade in hand, but that had been
a day before he’d lost both brother and son on the bleak Prallan highrock.
“There!” Elhokar snapped suddenly, standing upright.
Dalenar fol owed the king’s gesture. In the distance he could barely make
out a large tower rolling onto the battlefield. Lady Jasnah, Elhokar’s sister, had been right—the Aleth offensive had forced the Prallans to commit their towers despite the approaching highstorm.
“He’ll be on that tower,” Elhokar said. With that, the young king hopped
up—Shardplate granting him spryness despite its bulk—and threw himself
over the side of the tower.
“By the—” Dalenar cursed, leaning over the rail and watching the king
drop to the first archer tier below, then leap over its ledge as well.