kandra
A creature able to wear another person's exact appearance, drawn on as a memory after the original is dead. In the modern Basin they are venerated under the Path as the *Faceless Immortals* — survivors of the old world bound by Contract to Harmony and walking Elendel in chosen mortal disguises rather than serving Great Houses as they once did. MB2:SoS:Ch 7
A species created by the Lord Ruler during his Ascension and bound thereafter to single human masters by a Contract of voluntary service. Each kandra can take and wear a chosen human (or animal) body so completely that the Great Houses mistook Lord Renoux for a man for years and Vin mistook OreSeur in his second body for a real dog. Ordinary weapons cannot permanently injure them and standard Allomancy cannot reach their emotions; only a Mistborn-class Push, of the kind the Lord Ruler himself wielded, can. They retain a secret religion framed around Ruin and Preservation and still call him Father. MB1:WoA:Ch 40 superseded at MB2:SoS:Ch 7
A creature able to take and wear a person's exact appearance — related to (perhaps just older than) the mistwraiths and likewise boneless. To wear someone they must first devour the flesh and absorb the bones. They are expensive servants, paid in atium, and contracted ones do their work discreetly enough that even the Keepers have only rumour about where they come from. The one Kelsier had hired — first to play Lord Renoux, then to walk the Survivor's bones — has now reported to Vin under what Kelsier arranged to be a transferred contract. MB1:TFE:Epilogue superseded at MB1:WoA:Ch 40
A grown mistwraith — flesh transparent enough to show its bones when it lets the disguise drop — that digests a chosen body and wears it exactly, voice and all. Kandra take contracts. The one who served the crew as Lord Renoux was hired by Kelsier to take his own bones once he died and appear to the skaa as the returned Survivor. MB1:TFE:Ch 35 superseded at MB1:TFE:Epilogue
A creature able to take and wear a person's exact appearance. "Lord Renoux" is one — sent in by Kelsier's crew in place of the dead lord and playing the part of a Great House head with no apparent effort. The crew speaks of his service as a matter of course; what a kandra actually is, and where they come from, is left unexplained. MB1:TFE:Ch 19 superseded at MB1:TFE:Ch 35
Known facts
- venture-bears-tensoonStraff Venture keeps a kandra — TenSoon — in his confidence, currently wearing the bones of a former Hasting servant. The Great Houses use kandra both as their seemings-of-record (as Kelsier's crew uses 'Lord Renoux') and as private intelligence assets in their own keeps.MB1:TFE:Ch 28
- takes-kelsier-bones-by-contractThe kandra Kelsier contracted leaves Lord Renoux behind in the crossroads and assumes Kelsier's bones; it appears to the crew in the warehouse wearing his face and tells Vin this was its part of the plan all along — to return to the skaa as the Survivor and stiffen their faith.MB1:TFE:Ch 35
- internal-storage-of-objectsOreSeur demonstrates that an older kandra can split the flesh of his own shoulder, take in a small object, and reseal the skin around it — and that the object remains hidden from Allomantic iron and steel in the same way metal hidden inside a living body cannot be Pushed or Pulled from outside.MB1:WoA:Ch 8
- discarded-bones-carry-tracking-scentThe bones a kandra leaves behind after eating flesh and moving into a new body carry a sharp, bile-like digestive scent for hours — strong enough that dogs untrained to it can find a discarded skeleton stuffed in a closet within minutes. Recently expelled bones can be distinguished from old ones by how vividly the scent still clings.MB1:WoA:Ch 11
- immune-to-mental-allomancyA kandra cannot be touched by Soothing or Rioting — mental Allomancy simply does not register on them, the way it bounces off someone burning copper. They themselves cannot detect the attempt, but the Allomancer sees no reaction, which makes the test a usable filter (with false positives from stoic humans).MB1:WoA:Ch 13
- cannot-burn-metalsA kandra who eats an Allomancer does not inherit Allomancy along with the bones. Catching a suspected impostor in the act of burning a metal therefore clears them — a usable test against the Mistings of Elend's inner crew.MB1:WoA:Ch 13
- always-on-a-contractOreSeur insists that no kandra is allowed to enter human society without being on a Contract to a human master — there are no rogue kandra — and that the Contract permits a kandra to refuse to answer questions classified as kandra secrets, even from his own master.MB1:WoA:Ch 13
- nearly-destroyed-before-contractOreSeur tells Vin on the keep wall that when the Final Empire was new his people tried simply to melt into human society, were hunted down by Mistborn sent against them, and were almost extinguished. The Contract was their answer — every kandra bound to refuse to kill humans, to take bones only on command, and to serve a single human master with absolute obedience — and in exchange humans stopped slaughtering them. It also implies that Mistborn can detect his people somehow, which she files away without pressing.MB1:WoA:Ch 22
- have-secret-religionOreSeur confirms to Vin that the kandra still hold a religion of their own, kept secret from the Keepers and from any human master — its prophecies framed in terms of Ruin and Preservation, its central image the day humans will destroy themselves using the koloss as their pawns. If the surviving Keepers knew, it would mean the Lord Ruler's suppression of independent faiths under the Final Empire had never been complete.MB1:WoA:Ch 33
- interview-victims-before-bonesPer OreSeur, a kandra preparing to take a person's bones works to learn the private texture of the victim's life — interviewing them several times in different settings, talking to their acquaintances, and where the kandra's master is willing, torturing the victim outright — so that the imposter can produce private memories and confidential details on cue and reinforce the illusion.MB1:WoA:Ch 33
- created-by-lord-rulerOreSeur tells Vin that the kandra are not an older race that joined the empire — they did not exist before the Lord Ruler's Ascension. Kandra lore teaches that Father created them, perhaps originally as his own spies. They no longer believe everything he was, but they continue to call him Father, and their theology around him is complicated even for themselves.MB1:WoA:Ch 40
- enslaved-by-mistborn-duralumin-soothingOrdinary Allomancy does not affect the kandra, and ordinary weapons do not permanently hurt them; the thing that frightens them about humans is Mistborn-class power. Vin experiments on OreSeur with steadily harder Soothings until she breaks the rule by burning duralumin on a flared Soothing — and OreSeur convulses, howls a sound no dog could make, and tells her with quiet horror never to do it again. The Lord Ruler, whose inordinate Allomancy let him pierce copperclouds and touch metals inside a body, was the model for whatever this control is: Vin can do enough of the same things that, with duralumin, she has just stumbled onto it.MB1:WoA:Ch 40
- require-a-skeleton-to-form-a-bodyWithout a skeleton to support them, the kandra are nearly helpless. A boneless kandra is a heap of translucent muscle that can taste and shift but cannot crush sensory organs into useful shape under its own weight — eyes will not work without a skull, ears will not work without ear canals. The Second Generation keep TenSoon in this state in his pit; when they finally throw him a skull, he is able to form a tongue and lungs in seconds.MB1:HoA:Ch 2
- always-build-human-shapeEven when freed of the need to imitate any specific human and given a True Body of their own design, kandra almost always build themselves in human shape — two arms, two legs, a face after the fashion of mankind — while their feral cousins the mistwraiths arrange bones however they please.MB1:HoA:Ch 7
- generation-population-distributionEarlier kandra Generations — Firsts, Seconds, Thirds — are small in number, many having been killed in the first centuries when humans still feared them; later Generations are well populated, with the Tenth alone counting over a hundred individuals. The Trustwarren's benches were built to hold the entire people but are typically filled by only those off-Contract.MB1:HoA:Ch 9
- new-kandra-born-of-mistwraiths-given-a-blessingA kandra is not born; it is made. A mistwraith given one of the Blessings loses most of its animal instincts as it gains sentience, and a new generation must then relearn over many years how to shape muscles and form bodies. The newest, eleventh-generation kandra in the Homeland are little more than glistening blobs around a few bones.MB1:HoA:Ch 20
- feel-pain-as-acutely-as-humansAlthough kandra can re-form their flesh to remove wounds, they feel pain as acutely as any human while injured — and with the Blessing of Presence there is no release of unconsciousness. The Second Generation plans to break TenSoon's bones publicly precisely because his Blessing will not let him retreat from the pain.MB1:HoA:Ch 24
- founded-when-rashek-spiked-his-packmen-into-sentient-mistwraithsThe kandra race was founded by the Lord Ruler at the Well of Ascension: he transformed every living Terris Feruchemist into a mistwraith, beginning that species, and then restored his own Terris companions — the packmen who had climbed the mountain with him and Alendi — to sentience by driving Hemalurgic spikes into them. They are the First Generation.MB1:HoA:Ch 62
- made-third-and-last-as-the-lord-rulers-power-wanedTenSoon places the kandra last in the order of the Lord Ruler's spike creations — after Inquisitors and koloss — made when his power was already waning. The trade-off of fewer spikes is greater independence: ordinary koloss and Inquisitors are pushed toward killing by Ruin's impulses even when he is not driving them directly, where a kandra left to itself remains itself.MB1:HoA:Ch 66
- first-contract-charge-was-to-gather-and-hide-atiumThe First Generation tell Sazed the charge the Father gave them at their making: as the koloss were made to fight and the Inquisitors to preach, the kandra were made to gather a thing and hide it against the day Ruin escaped his prison. The thing is atium — Ruin's own body — and they have kept it under the Trustwarren's dais all along. The kandra Contracts paid in atium were always the gathering mechanism.MB1:HoA:Ch 71
- kandra-killed-by-shattering-bones-while-they-healSazed notices in the fight against the Fifth Generation guards that their flesh closes on command and reasons out why their own jailers carry hammers: kandra cannot be cut down in any lasting way, but if you smash their granite, stone, or wood bones into shards they cannot hold a body together. The fight against a kandra is a fight against the bones, not the flesh.MB1:HoA:Ch 78
- spikes-let-ruin-control-any-kandraWhen Ruin reaches into KanPaar near the Pits, Vin sees how: the spikes every kandra carries to maintain their Blessing are also a leash. The same metal that grants their sentience makes them, like the Inquisitors and the koloss, creatures Ruin can take when he chooses. The only escape is to pull the spikes — to die as a mistwraith rather than serve him.MB1:HoA:Ch 79
- kandra-resolution-fulfilledAcross the Homeland the kandra who hear the Resolution called pull their own Blessing spikes free and collapse into mistwraiths, stone and wood and metal bones jumbled at strange angles, spikes scattered across the cavern floors. The act ends their sentience and most of who they were, but it puts every taken kandra out of Ruin's reach in a single moment.MB1:HoA:Ch 80
- how-to-kill-or-incapacitateMeLaan tells Wax how to put one down: gunshots and most physical damage are useless; acid works but is horribly inefficient; crushing the skeleton makes them hard to move; the reliable answer is to pull the spike out, which reverts the kandra to her primal mistwraith state. The kandra are weaker than other Hemalurgic creatures because they hold only two spikes and can therefore be captured.MB2:SoS:Ch 13
- self-termination-methodPer MeLaan in the mansion hallway: roughly a century after the Catacendre the kandra worked out a deliberate method by which any of them can end their own life — a small act of concentration that puts the body into a terminal spiral. Devised under TenSoon in the aftermath of Ruin's attempt to seize them directly; their guaranteed escape hatch should anything like that ever happen again.MB2:SoS:Ch 19
- counter-revolution-on-the-streetsPer TenSoon to Wax in the Homeland: while Paalm tries to spark a revolution from her Lord Ruler-era playbook, the rest of the kandra are out in Elendel tonight doing what she does in reverse — for every priest she puts on a corner inciting murder, they put dozens preaching peace, temperance, and patience. She underestimates them because she disdains them.MB2:SoS:Ch 20
Events
- MB1:TFE:Ch 35 The kandra that wore Lord Renoux steps into the lantern light wearing Kelsier's face and bones, explains its contract with him, hands Vin the pouch he left, and goes about its other business.
Relations
- relatedLord Renoux — Lord Renoux is in fact a kandra wearing the dead lord's bones. MB1:TFE:Ch 19
- relatedRashek — OreSeur tells Vin outright that the Lord Ruler created the kandra during his Ascension, and that they still call him Father. MB1:WoA:Ch 40
Backreferences
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 1
- factWaxillium Ladrian
- factVenDell
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 2
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 3
- factThe Bands of Mourning
- factReLuur
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 6
- factThe Lord Mistborn
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 19
- factMeLaan
- factMeLaan
- factMeLaan
- factKandra-immobilizing fluid
- factThe Bands of Mourning
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 19
- factLord Renoux
- factLord Renoux
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 28
- factkandra
- factTenSoon
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 34
- summaryMB1:TFE:Ch 35
- factKelsier
- factLord Renoux
- factkandra
- summaryMB1:TFE:Epilogue
- factKelsier
- factVin
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 2
- factkandra
- factFirst Generation
- factSecond Generation
- factThird Generation
- factFirst Contract
- factFirst Contract
- factBlessing of Presence
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 5
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 7
- factkandra
- factVarSell
- factFifth Generation
- factTrue Body
- factThe Trustwarren
- factBlessing of Potency
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 9
- factkandra
- factTenSoon
- factFirst Contract
- factMeLaan
- factSeventh Generation
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 10
- factFirst Contract
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 11
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- factSecond Generation
- factFirst Contract
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 20
- factkandra
- factTenSoon
- factSecond Generation
- factFirst Generation
- factBlessing of Awareness
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 24
- factkandra
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 33
- factTenSoon
- factKanPaar
- factRitual Imprisonment of ChanGaar
- factBlessing of Stability
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 39
- factTenSoon
- factFirst Contract
- factHemalurgy
- factHemalurgy
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 45
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 52
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 54
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 59
- factTenSoon
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 62
- factkandra
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 63
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 64
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 65
- factHemalurgy
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 66
- factkandra
- factBlessing
- factBlessing
- factFeruchemy
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 68
- factFirst Generation
- factFirst Generation
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 71
- factkandra
- factThe Trust
- factHaddek
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 75
- factSecond Generation
- factFirst Contract
- factThe Resolution
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 78
- factkandra
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- factFirst Generation
- factHarmony
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 79
- factkandra
- factThe Resolution
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 80
- factkandra
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 81
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 82
- factTrellium
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 9
- factThe Bands of Mourning
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 10
- factMarasi
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 13
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 15
- factVenDell
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 17
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 18
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 19
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 20
- factWayne
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 23
- factVenDell
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 27
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 38
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 53
- summaryMB2:TLM:Epilogue
- factMarasi
- factTwinSoul
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 7
- factThe Contract
- factHarmony
- factBleeder
- factThird Generation
- factBlessing
- factMeLaan
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 13
- factKandra-Detection Syringe
- factBleeder
- factKandra Homeland
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 18
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 19
- factkandra
- factOriginators' Tomb
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 20
- factkandra
- factBleeder
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 21
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 22
- factMarasi
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 25
- factBleeder
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 26
- factBleeder
- factBleeder
- summaryMB2:SoS:Epilogue
- factMeLaan
- factTrell
- factTrell's Spike
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 1
- factOreSeur
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 2
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 5
- factOreSeur
- factkandra
- factOreSeur
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 11
- factKeep Venture
- factkandra
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 13
- factkandra
- factkandra
- factkandra
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 20
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 22
- factVin
- factkandra
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 24
- factVin
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 25
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 26
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 27
- factStraff Venture
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 29
- factVin
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 33
- factkandra
- factkandra
- factRuin
- factPreservation
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 35
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 36
- factDemoux
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 40
- factkandra
- factkandra
- factThe Well of Ascension
- factThe Contract
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 42
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 47
- factTenSoon
- factTenSoon
- factAllomantic control of kandra
- summaryMB1:WoA:Ch 54
- factVin
- factRuin