Ironeyes
also known as Ironeyes
Kelsier's older brother and the original Steel Inquisitor of the surviving crew — known across modern Scadrial as Ironeyes, Death himself. He still wears the heavy spikes through his eye-sockets, one socket long since crushed, the tattoos faded around them; his black robes hang on a frame gone nearly skeletal. He has lived centuries on atium, compounded by Hemalurgy, and is at last running out — age stalking him with every breath. He counts himself one of three remaining legs of a tripod with Harmony and the Survivor. MB2:TLM:Ch 28
A real, living figure — not just a mythology entry — who walks the alleys of Elendel in a black robe. Over six feet tall, shaven-headed, with intricate tattoos around his eyes and a pair of thick spike-heads driven point-first into the sockets, one long since crushed. Uses both emotional Allomancy (which he says he tends to apply too hard) and Steel-Push flight; calls Harmony his brother and disagrees with him in places. Marasi meets him after Miles' execution and recognises him at once from the old stories as Death himself. MB2:AoL:Epilogue superseded at MB2:TLM:Ch 28
A figure from Scadrial's deep past, revered within Sliverism and treated by the broader city as faintly sinister; in common vernacular the name has hardened into a euphemism for death, the kind of thing a Roughs man tells a prisoner he is about to meet if he keeps his mouth shut. MB2:AoL:Ch 8 superseded at MB2:AoL:Epilogue
A figure from Scadrial's deep past who is held in reverence — and, by mainstream city opinion, regarded as a dubious object of worship — within Sliverism. MB2:AoL:Ch 4 superseded at MB2:AoL:Ch 8
Kelsier's older brother — alive and an Inquisitor. Eleven spikes (two through the skull, eight through the chest, one through the spine) ache in time with his moods; one of them lets him see. The last Inquisitor left in Luthadel, and now sole heir of the Canton of Inquisition — he intends to gut the Ministry from inside before anyone notices. MB1:TFE:Epilogue superseded at MB2:AoL:Ch 4
Kelsier's older brother — alive, and now an Inquisitor. He had let the Ministry take him in their study of the order so he could turn it from inside. The body left at the Soothing station was not his; the cost was eleven spikes driven through his body. MB1:TFE:Ch 38 superseded at MB1:TFE:Epilogue
Kelsier's older brother, sent into the Steel Ministry as a spy and worked his way through the obligator ranks to within reach of the Inquisitors. Taken in his own Soothing station and killed by an Inquisitor — flayed and dismembered, his head crushed — after pressing too close to whatever secret the Ministry guards about its Inquisitor order. MB1:TFE:Ch 32 superseded at MB1:TFE:Ch 38
Kelsier's older brother. Hard-faced, statuesque, and openly disapproving of thieves; he has been away from Yeden's circle and from his brother's plans both. Kelsier intends to send him into the Steel Ministry as a spy regardless. MB1:TFE:Ch 6 superseded at MB1:TFE:Ch 32
Known facts
- misting-seekerMarsh is a Seeker — a Misting who burns bronze and can feel another Allomancer's pulses at a distance.MB1:TFE:Ch 7
- ironeyes-nicknameMarsh was once nicknamed Ironeyes for his hard stare; people quietly stopped using it because it sounded too much like a name for an Inquisitor.MB1:TFE:Ch 10
- ironeyesMarsh is known to the underground as "Ironeyes" for the hard, unsmiling stare he turns on people; the name comes to Vin's mind on the Renoux fore-balcony when he first turns it on her.MB1:TFE:Ch 20
- snapped-mother-takenMarsh came into his Allomancy as a child, on the day the obligators took his and Kelsier's mother. That loss is what sent him into the rebellion and what fixed his hatred on the Ministry rather than on the nobility.MB1:TFE:Ch 20
- identified-vin-mistbornMarsh tells Vin he made her for Mistborn the day she Soothed him in his shop months ago: she was instinctively burning trace pewter and tin pulled from her own water and dining ware. That is why he kept watch on her at all, and why Dockson knew the alley to look in.MB1:TFE:Ch 20
- infiltrated-canton-of-inquisitionMarsh enters the Steel Ministry under the most dangerous of its branches — the Canton of Inquisition — and takes the full facial tattoos of an acolyte, including the thick red line down one side of the face that marks an Inquisition obligator. The marks are permanent: from here on he is either an obligator or a fraud, nothing else.MB1:TFE:Ch 27
- killed-by-inquisitorMarsh is taken in his own Soothing station and killed by an Inquisitor — flayed, dismembered, and his head crushed — for pressing the Steel Ministry too hard on the secret of the Inquisitor order. He leaves a single sheet hidden inside a hollowed table leg, addressed to Kelsier: he is sure the Inquisitors guard a weakness, and that the other obligators only whisper of it.MB1:TFE:Ch 32
- kills-kar-and-the-other-inquisitorsMarsh kills the Luthadel Inquisitors in their sleep — every one of them but Kar, whom he takes from behind in the throne room with a single yank on the spike in his spine — then turns the same trick on the Lord Ruler and finds, where the spine spike should be, only skin.MB1:TFE:Ch 38
- conventical-emptyTracks Sazed down in the south to tell him that the Conventical of Seran — the Steel Ministry stronghold the Inquisitors and high obligators retreated to after the Lord Ruler's death — now stands empty, and recruits him to help search it.MB1:WoA:Ch 7
- post-conversion-voice-and-affectSince his conversion to Steel Inquisitor, his voice has gone grinding and gristly like the other Inquisitors, his face has lost its expressions, and he no longer uses body language while speaking — and he refers to the other Inquisitors as his brethren.MB1:WoA:Ch 7
- orders-sazed-to-luthadelTells Sazed on the road south that his work teaching village skaa is the wrong duty — that the peasants will forget him but that no one will forget what is about to happen in the Central Dominance, and that once the Conventical is searched Sazed is to return to Luthadel.MB1:WoA:Ch 9
- attacks-sazed-in-kredik-shawMarsh — vanished since the Conventical — is found at the hidden door in Kredik Shaw when Sazed runs in after Vin. He says he does not know why he must kill the Terrisman and that Sazed should not have come, then Pushes on Sazed's metal bracers and throws him into the wall.MB1:WoA:Ch 57
- vanishes-after-kredik-shawBy the time Sazed and Ham return from the storage cavern beneath Kredik Shaw, Marsh has vanished. His work — to stall Sazed long enough for Vin to reach the Well — is done.MB1:WoA:Epilogue
- imprisoned-as-inquisitor-under-ruins-controlThree years into his existence as a Steel Inquisitor Marsh is awake inside his own body but cannot use it: Ruin takes him at will and walks him through whatever work is wanted. He has given up trying to escape the spikes and has begun trying to make himself reach for the linchpin spike in his back so that pulling it free will kill him. In one of the brief windows when he has himself back, his attempt fails — It takes him again, and his hand obeys It instead.MB1:HoA:Prologue
- brief-lucidity-when-ruin-looks-awayWhen Ruin is not actively focused on him, Marsh sometimes recovers his own thoughts for short intervals and is fully aware of what his body has been made to do; the moment he tries to resist or harm himself, Ruin reasserts control. Through repetition he has accepted that he will never be free enough of Ruin to kill himself.MB1:HoA:Ch 6
- plans-to-self-sacrifice-by-pulling-back-spikeMarsh resolves, while Ruin's attention is elsewhere, to spend his remaining captivity in deliberate stillness rather than struggling — so that when the right moment comes he can surprise his master and act once. The act, when it comes, will be to pull the Inquisitor linchpin spike from his back and kill himself, denying Ruin its most useful tool at the moment it matters. He frames it as the same kind of trade Kelsier made for the skaa.MB1:HoA:Ch 13
- most-spiked-inquisitor-given-ten-new-spikesOf all the Inquisitors, Marsh has been given the largest number of new spikes — ten new ones, planted at various points in his body — which ostensibly makes him the most powerful Inquisitor Ruin has. The other Inquisitors have been called away on tasks; Marsh has been left, unwatched, with the koloss army.MB1:HoA:Ch 13
- abandoned-skaa-rebellion-after-kelsiers-captureBefore the fall of the Final Empire, Marsh had run the skaa rebellion — thousands had looked to him for leadership. When Kelsier and Mare were captured and cast into the Pits of Hathsin, Marsh left the rebellion. Not out of fear, he tells himself, but from realism: if the Lord Ruler could catch the most brilliant thief of his time, the Lord Ruler would eventually catch him. Kelsier then escaped and toppled the empire anyway, and the choice has shaped Marsh's life ever since.MB1:HoA:Ch 13
- loved-mare-before-kelsierBoth Kelsier and Marsh loved Mare before the Pits; she chose Kelsier. When she died, Marsh gave up the rebellion and Kelsier used her dream of green plants and a clean sky as the engine of his own — overthrowing the Final Empire as a kind of penance for letting her die thinking he had hated her. Marsh now reads this as why she chose Kelsier rightly: of the two of them, only Kelsier made her dream come true.MB1:HoA:Ch 13
- holds-back-a-sliver-of-self-while-feigning-submissionMarsh is letting Ruin think it has him. A small piece of him remains free; he keeps it sleeping, performs the dark song of an apocalyptic countryside as joy, and does not fight the rest. The strategy is patience — to be trusted as a tool long enough that one moment of his own will eventually counts for something.MB1:HoA:Ch 34
- spike-sight-renders-the-world-in-allomantic-linesMarsh's spiked eyes have trouble distinguishing colour but can read the Allomantic lines of metal in any room as bright threads against a pristine white background. The richer the metal content of an object, the more expressive the lines; with the trick learned, he can pick out real colour when he wants to.MB1:HoA:Ch 34
- was-turned-into-an-inquisitor-the-night-he-was-arrestedReturning to Luthadel for the first time since Ruin took him, Marsh remembers the night the Inquisitors took him. He had been embedded in the Steel Priesthood as Kelsier's inside man, expecting to be exposed at any moment. Instead he was chosen. The Inquisitors came in the night, threw him down, pinned a screaming captive Allomancer on top of him, and hammered a spike through her chest into his eye socket. He has only fragments of the rest — more Allomancers killed against his body, more spikes driven home, the order dancing with axes around the bodies after the work was done.MB1:HoA:Ch 42
- arrives-at-fadrex-as-ruins-pawn-when-yomen-fails-to-deliver-atiumMarsh strides into Yomen's audience chamber and immediately bows to the figure only Vin can see, demanding that Yomen hand over atium before Elend's koloss reach the city. When Yomen confesses there is none, Marsh tells him to let Fadrex burn before forty thousand koloss — and that the Lord Ruler is dead, an unprofitable servant himself.MB1:HoA:Ch 63
- survives-an-earring-driven-through-his-skullVin duralumin-Pushes her mother's earring like a needle through Marsh's forehead and out the back of his head — and he climbs back to his feet a minute later, the catastrophic wound closing under Inquisitor regeneration.MB1:HoA:Ch 65
- broke-free-of-ruin-long-enough-to-pull-vins-earringInside Hemalurgic bloodlust, Marsh still hears a very small voice of his own. He remembers having given up the skaa rebellion one year before his brother toppled the empire — the great shame of his life — and remembers Spook's warning about metal piercing a person. Recognising Vin's earring as a small spike, and using the window Ruin's killing-joy opened in his control, he rips the earring free.MB1:HoA:Ch 72
- living-on-the-last-of-his-atiumSinking into a chair in the Bilming Constabulary, Marsh tells Wax and Marasi he is dying. He has compounded his life on atium long past his natural span and the metal is nearly gone; with each breath his face vacillates between decades of age. He came to Bilming hoping someone here might be re-creating the metal — and was willing, before, to simply let it run out. His commitment to keep struggling on comes from the part he played in destroying the old world: he swore he would help, and the oath holds.MB2:TLM:Ch 28
- duralumin-gun-crushOn his way to Wax's interrogation room Marsh disarms a Seeker constable who draws on him: he Pulls the man's pistol across the room, suspends it between his palms, and *crushes the barrel* in mid-air with simultaneous Push and Pull. Asked later how, he names two things — duralumin, and a long lifetime of practice.MB2:TLM:Ch 28
Events
- MB1:TFE:Ch 6 First appearance; enters at the end of the meeting and demands a private word with Kelsier.
- MB1:TFE:Ch 7 Comes to confront Kelsier over the rebellion job, grudgingly agrees to listen to the plan.
- MB1:TFE:Ch 10 Present at the meeting — sour, silent — and reports the Ministry is too tight to crack on his current timeline.
- MB1:TFE:Ch 20 Arrives in the courtyard, then takes Vin up to the fore-balcony and walks her through the basics of bronze-sense; catches her trying to Soothe him in the middle of it and tells her — coldly, then less coldly — not to do it again.
- MB1:TFE:Ch 27 Arrives in obligator robe with full Canton of Inquisition face tattoos, gives his report — hidden Soothing stations across the city and an Inquisitor lineage drawn from noble Mistings — and slips back out before he is missed at his next appointment.
- MB1:TFE:Ch 38 Walks in spike-eyed and robed, kills Kar with a single pull on the spine spike, then charges the Lord Ruler looking for the same weakness and finds none.
- MB1:TFE:Ch 38 Hangs in the Lord Ruler's one-handed grip as the older man rages — and is dropped to the floor when Vin names him.
- MB1:TFE:Ch 38 Sits up off the wall with his ribs already healing, walks with Vin and Sazed to the broken window, and tells the dying Lord Ruler that his obligators will forget him.
- MB1:TFE:Epilogue Stands at the rooftop edge in his Inquisitor robe, ribs already healed, before heading down to the keep to represent the Ministry to Elend's new government.
- MB1:HoA:Ch 63 Strides into the audience chamber as Elend's army breaks camp, bows to the invisible god, demands the atium, then disavows Yomen and walks out telling him to let Fadrex burn.
- MB1:HoA:Ch 65 Holds Vin at arm's length and tells her plainly that Hemalurgy is Ruin's power; orders Yomen to throw his army into the koloss line; survives an earring duralumin-Pushed through his skull; taps a Feruchemical strength reserve through one of his spikes to grow large in her grasp; and finally is broken by her mist-fed duralumin-Soothing and Pushes himself out the window into the mist.
- MB1:HoA:Ch 72 Watches from the rubble while thirteen Inquisitors take Vin apart at Kredik Shaw, then takes over the torture personally — and, against Ruin's grip on him, rips the earring from her ear during the killing-joy that loosens Ruin's hold.
- MB1:HoA:Ch 73 Watches Vin take apart his twelve brothers, fights briefly when she lands beside him, then lies broken in a puddle waiting for her to finish him off. She pulls one eye-spike, hesitates over the second, and vanishes.
- MB1:HoA:Ch 81 Steps out of the koloss ranks behind Elend, burning his own atium (taken from a kandra he killed), with Lord-Ruler-grade combined Allomancy and Feruchemy. Drives Elend to the ground; lies that Vin is already dead; takes Elend's head with the obsidian axe after his last metals burn out.
- MB1:WoA:Ch 7 Waits on the road outside the village in a black robe, the heads of his eye-spikes catching the last sun; his voice has gone grinding and gristly, his face entirely still, and he calls the other Inquisitors "my brethren".
- MB1:WoA:Ch 9 Walks the highway south beside Sazed at a pace no horse will share, blunt as ever, and bluntly tells him to return to Luthadel once the Conventical is searched.
- MB1:WoA:Ch 12 Drops the cage to clear the way, climbs down by Allomantic agility, and is matched at the bottom by Sazed gliding in on a half-filled ironmind.
- MB1:WoA:Ch 12 Forces the front door open with Sazed, breaks off to search the Inquisitors' upstairs quarters alone, and returns down to the plate chamber to tell Sazed the upstairs is bare.
- MB1:WoA:Ch 57 Standing in the hidden doorway with his head bowed, Marsh tells Sazed he should not have come, says he does not know why he must kill him, and Pushes him bodily into the wall by his metal bracers.
- MB1:WoA:Ch 58 Fights Sazed across the marble audience chamber, Pushing him into walls, embedding the pouch of metalminds in his flesh, and overpowering him with two years' accumulated experience as a killer before being clubbed from behind.
- MB2:TLM:Ch 28 Arrives at the Bilming Constabulary in black robes, terrifies Entrone off the case, then sags into a chair and ages decades with each breath while laying out the Tobal Copper lead and the Set's Hemalurgy limits.
- MB2:AoL:Epilogue Watches Miles' death from the shadows below the balcony, ignored by the constables, then turns into the alley.
- MB2:AoL:Epilogue Waits for Marasi at the mouth of a side alley, hands her the book for Wax, calls Harmony his brother, and lifts off over the rooftops by Allomancy.
Relations
- relatedVin — Marsh confirms how Dockson tracked down Vin as a Mistborn — she was pulling pewter and tin from her own dining ware in Kelsier's shop without knowing it. MB1:TFE:Ch 20
- relatedHarmony — Ironeyes refers to Harmony as his brother, pairing with the AoL-era reframing of his identity. MB2:AoL:Epilogue
Backreferences
- summaryMB2:AoL:Ch 4
- factSliverism
- summaryMB2:AoL:Epilogue
- factMarasi
- factIroneyes' Book
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 19
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 26
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 2
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 6
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 7
- factMarsh
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 8
- factKelsier
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 10
- factMarsh
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 16
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 17
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 20
- factVin
- factAllomancy
- factMarsh
- factMarsh
- factMarsh
- factBronze
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 26
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 27
- factSteel Inquisitor
- factMarsh
- factThe Twists
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 29
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 32
- factKelsier
- factMarsh
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 33
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 34
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 35
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 38
- factSteel Inquisitor
- factMarsh
- summaryMB1:TFE:Epilogue
- factKelsier
- factVin
- factSteel Inquisitor
- factElend Venture
- factHarmony
- summaryMB1:HoA:Prologue
- factSteel Inquisitor
- factMarsh
- factHemalurgy
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 4
- factHarmony
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 6
- factSteel Inquisitor
- factMarsh
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 12
- factHemalurgy
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 13
- factMarsh
- factMarsh
- factMarsh
- factMarsh
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 34
- factMarsh
- factMarsh
- factHemalurgy
- factMount Tyrian
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 37
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 40
- factSteel Inquisitor
- factHemalurgy
- factHemalurgy
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 42
- factSteel Inquisitor
- factMarsh
- factHemalurgy
- factHemalurgic Bind Points
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 57
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 58
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 63
- factMarsh
- factAradan Yomen
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 65
- factVin
- factVin
- factSteel Inquisitor
- factMarsh
- factHemalurgy
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 67
- factVin
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 69
- factGoradel
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 72
- factVin
- factMarsh
- factVin's Earring
- factVin's Earring
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 73
- factVin
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 81
- factElend Venture
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 28
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 28
- factMarsh
- factMarsh
- factThe Survivor
- factThe Set
- factThree interlocking diamonds
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 29
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 65
- factWayne's Coinshot Spike
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 2
- factHemalurgy
- factRuin
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 4
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 6
- factHemalurgy
- factWax's Pathian Earring
- factMarasi
- summaryMB2:SoS:Epilogue
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 3
- factVin
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 7
- factConventical of Seran
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 9
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 12
- factSteel Inquisitor
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 15
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 20
- factBronze
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 50
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 57
- factMarsh
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 58
- factHammond
- factHarmony
- summaryMB1:WoA:Epilogue
- factMarsh