Mist sickness
The Snapping of latent Allomancers by the mists. Roughly one person in six exposed to the day-mists is forced through the near-death pain that opens an Allomancer's gift; a small fraction die of it, and the survivors emerge as Mistings. Elend works it out in Fadrex — the sixteen-percent figure matches the sixteen Allomantic metals, and the suffering matches his own father's beating of him to Snap him. The mists are not killing the empire's people. They are growing humanity an army. MB1:HoA:Ch 70
The killing effect the mists have begun to inflict on people since Vin released the power at the Well of Ascension. When the mists are out by day, roughly one person in six who stands in them is taken with a seizure; a small fraction of those die. Survivors are afterwards immune, and animals are untouched. Nothing the empire's scholars have tried prevents it. MB1:HoA:Ch 8 superseded at MB1:HoA:Ch 70
Known facts
- strikes-exactly-sixteen-percentVin presses Noorden to recompute his ledgers and discovers that the mist sickness takes precisely sixteen percent of every population exposed — population after population, group after group, to the man. Among the dying the curve runs ordinary, but the proportion who fall ill is exact in a way no natural disease ever is. Vin takes the regularity as evidence of law: that whatever is behind the sickness obeys rules, and so can be understood.MB1:HoA:Ch 21
- spares-the-terrisThe killing effect of the day mists does not reach the Terris. The elders at the Pits still send their people out to work in morning mists as a matter of course; no Terrisman there has been struck. Sazed notes the exception without yet knowing the reason.MB1:HoA:Ch 22
- three-sixteens-patternThe scribes working under Elend Venture discover that the sickness held no randomness at all. Five thousand of the army's roughly thirty-one thousand soldiers fell to it — exactly the sixteen-in-a-hundred ratio. One in sixteen of the survivors took sixteen days, hour for hour, to rise; everyone else rose in one. The number repeats so cleanly that Elend's scribes later argue something intelligent had to have shaped it; Demoux reads the same precision as proof that the Survivor himself sorted the army into the faithful and the cursed.MB1:HoA:Ch 36
- the-nobility-appear-immuneSpook casually notes the part of Quellion's takeover the Urteau preaching glossed over — the nobility never got taken by the mists. Not skaa with noble blood, but actual nobles. Sazed is startled enough to ask him to repeat it. He doubts Elend knows of the pattern; their own army and the Luthadel holdouts have all been skaa.MB1:HoA:Ch 49
- is-the-snapping-of-latent-allomancersElend works it out in Yomen's infirmary, watching a stricken boy in the same pain his own father once beat into him: the mists are not killing the sixteen percent of people they take. They are forcing them through Snapping. He proves it on a one-armed soldier from his own ranks, who drinks a metal vial, finds the burn his body already knows, and pulses on Elend's bronze as a Misting. The whole sweep of mistsickness in the empire has been Preservation growing humanity an Allomantic army.MB1:HoA:Ch 70
Backreferences
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 17
- factElend Venture
- factDemoux
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 21
- factMist sickness
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 22
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 25
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 28
- factElend Venture
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 36
- factDemoux
- factMist sickness
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 40
- factElend Venture
- factMistfallen
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 49
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 70
- factMist sickness
- summaryMB1:HoA:Ch 80
- factDemoux
- factDemoux