I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted.
I’ve been thinking about the prophecy and well plot in The Well of Ascension. In short, Sazed, the guy who really cares about understanding religions, finds Kwaan’s inscription written in metal, with the above quote as its first line. Lacking time to read it all, he copies it onto paper to bring to Luthadel for study. Over the course of the book, he draws a conclusion from the text that turns out at the end to be horribly wrong, the paper text having been modified by a god bent on annihilation who has now been released from his prison.
On the planet Earth, in the year 1827 Anno Domini, a man named Joseph Smith claimed to have dug up a collection of text-inscribed golden plates that an angel had led him to. He began translating the plates, copying their text onto paper. The following year’s summer, his first 116 pages were lost; rather than rewrite them (possibly because any inconsistency in the over a hundred pages would reveal the plates’ nonexistence), he just summarized them and continued from where he left off. This supposed translation of most of the golden plates’ text, now called the Book of Mormon, is the foundational text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or LDS, of which Brandon Sanderson is a member.
So uhhhh
